> At the same time that the major factors expanding the economic pie were losing momentum, other powerful forces emerged that would push toward dividing the pie more unequally The framing of the issue influences what conclusions one draws. Here, the authors think of the economy as a "pie" created by "factors" that gets "divided up". What naturally follows is that if some get a bigger "slice" than others, it is inhere…
I am not sure if the story of "creating" wealth is correct. When I look at people like Bezos or Gates I am not sure they created as much as they were able to gain a larger share of a market. I think without them we would have been fine and other players would have been in the market. So I think to some degree they took wealth from others. I also don't believe that the top 1% (or pick another number) are creating more…
But they are - this is due to the huge productivity gains brought about by the application of computers.
For a small example, in the 1960's and 70s, my dad was writing a book, using a typewriter. Every set of revisions meant typing the book over again (to get a clean manuscript). My mom helped out, spending hours and hours banging out a new manuscript. I still feel bad for her doing that boring, numbing work, but that's how things were in those days.
In the 90s, my dad used a text editor to make revisions and just pushed a button to print out a clean manuscript.
Not only that, his computer was cheaper than his old typewriter was. Despite it being cheaper, the computer company got rich off of this. It also took my dad far, far less time to create a new book. It didn't sell well, but the computer company hardly stole their wealth from my dad.
P.S. The typewriter was also a big productivity gain over what went before - laboriously drawing each letter by hand. Companies made a lot of money selling typewriters, and that was wealth they created.