World's richest 500 see their wealth increase by $1T this year

Part A) That isn't a redefinition.

Wealth is a measure of assets. Assets are, for the most part, rivalrous goods.

Ownership's most fundamental quality is the exclusionary right to prevent others to use or occupy the asset in question. Owning lumber, for instance, has value because it lets you prevent other people from walking off and building their houses with it.

Accordingly wealth is exclusionary by nature.

Part B) You might think that wealth isn't constrained, but it is.

You can't own more lumber than the sum of all of the forests and cut planks in the world. You can't output more human labour than the sum of the population on the planet can provide, and you certainly can't build an object which is composed of more minerals than our race can obtain. Will those limits increase over time? Sure. But that doesn't mean there's no hard top-end limit.

Even if we jump to non-rivalrous goods and you say "but I can create intellectual property at an infinite rate - those rights and assets aren't bound to physical constraints" - you'd be wrong again. The capacity to create and define non-tangible assets susceptible to ownership requires human labour. If you wanted to produce ideas for comic books, for instance, you wouldn't be able to produce a database containing the brainstorming of 10 billion people in a year. Because you don't have 10 billion people on the planet.

So even at your value maximizing best, applying the best possible combinations of resources, labour and opportunities, you still won't be able to create infinite wealth for all asset classes.

If you mean that wealth isn't constrained because you can inflate the value of the denomination it is traded in, that doesn't change the value of the asset itself - that's completely orthogonal.

> the smarter people I know earn good salaries and have nice lifestyles. Nicer than their parents, in most cases, mainly because consumer technology constantly gets better and cheaper.

This is because today's booming companies rely on brain power instead of manpower. What does the future hold for people that aren't smart or born into money? As we continue externalizing intelligence to machines, eventually smart people will start falling victim to the automation trend that killed "dumb" jobs.

As I see it, we really need to increase funding for higher education (including adult retraining) and revamp K-12 to make the most of intelligent people from all socioeconomic backgrounds, while also placing greater emphasis on trade programs and small businesses.

We'd also benefit from tariffs on imported Chinese goods, increasing domestic manufacturing (rather than waiting until free trade equalizes global quality of life).

> I'm really at a loss for what exactly I'm supposed to be feeling outraged about.

Personally, I'm deeply concerned but not outraged... I vote for sound policies and politicians that may avoid the next Great Depression, but I profit when the public votes for more unregulated capitalism.

I think discussions like this often devolve into religious wars, but I'll take a shot at it.

If you have a village of a hundred of starving artisans and workers, but no crops because they have no seed corn, you have high demand, but no capital, and so no one gets fed. Consumer demand isn't enough.

To address demand, someone must invest in production. Lets assume that the entire village has earned seed corn by selling their pottery but has no farming land. The villagers can eat the seed corn, so they do. But one day farmer walks into town and offers to give anyone 10x their seed corn in return for it, if they can just wait one growing season.

So now consumption is converted into investment. The farmer must get investment to have production. If the villagers tell him to just farm his land and they'll pay him in pottery when his crops are ready for sale, it won't work.

Now if the farmer has lots of seed corn, but the villagers died of starvation waiting, he's got no customers. He needs demand to make his investment valuable, otherwise it can only feed him, and he'll never get pottery or any other goods from it.

Consumption is the benefit of investment, and it helps drive more investment, but it's not the direct creator of it. Now lets assume the village and the farmer reach equilibrium. He plants enough crops every year to feed all of them, and they make enough goods that it's worthwhile to him to do it. Everyone's standard of living can rise as the farmer more of his excess seed corn every year an reinvests it to farm bigger crops, and the well fed villagers compete to make better goods to earn more food.

Now the King decides to tax farming output at 99%. The farmer can plant enough to feed himself and keep all of it, or plant enough to feed everyone, and only keep the same amount. Obviously he's not going to work 100x as hard for the same benefits as he can working just for himself. So we have demand, and capital, but we've broken the incentive for investing. So the farmer just plants enough for himself, and in the mean-time he sells all that extra seed corn to villagers for goods, akin to a rich son spending his inheritance. By next year the farmer is surviving, but no longer wealthy and the village is starving.

Keynes-iasts always want to focus on the benefits of demand, but it's only part of the story. Friedman-ists want to focus on investment, but again it's only part of the story. Laffer gave incentives a bad name, he was the Elon Musk of economic overpromising, but he was essentially right about their importance.

Our economy functions ok right now even though our corporate tax system is among the worst in the world and makes for substantial impediments to investments. The Republican bill lowers the rate significantly and allows for one time repatriation, but still leaves significant disincentives (and doesn't address progressivity at all).

Our economy would likely function better, productivity and incomes would increase faster, if we eliminated corporate income taxes. But our entire tax system would become less progressive if we didn't also address dividend/capital gains rates when we eliminated them.

If a wealthy person earns their wealth, then they have benefitted from their contribution to society. If they are allowed to lock that wealth up multigenerationally, then they are incentivized to change the system to make it harder for others to do what they themselves have done, to the benefit of others who have also already taken advantage.

Society as a whole benefits much more when each generation has to earn the bulk of their wealth.

> This has more to do with advancements in medicine and technology than people becoming richer.

It's impossible to separate people becoming richer from advancements in technology. We didn't grow GDP by 77 times, because we work 77 times harder.

Improvements in underlying technology are what help us create more wealth. The problem is that the new wealth being created and benefits of that new technology is being shared so proportionally.