> it's the seriously rich that have taken all of the spoils, that's where the massive imbalance is.
It depends on how you define “spoils.” People define it to include notional paper wealth, and I think that doesn’t reflect the actual mechanics of economic imbalance. On paper, NVIDIA’s shareholders have increased their wealth by $4.8 trillion in five years, enough to buy all the residential real estate in New York City and LA combined. But $5 trillion in notional AI wealth isn’t actually the same as owning NYC and LA. The paper wealth doesn’t affect the average person meaningfully until someone actually buys something with it.
Given that, it’s more useful to define “spoils” in terms of finite goods and services and look at spending on those goods and services. That is what directly affects the average person—it’s what makes housing or education or Disney tickets or whatever harder to access.
And on that front, the income growth of the top 10% has had a much more significant impact on the average person. The top 10% accounts for half of consumer spending today, up from 35% in the 1990s. And that spending is coming from the upper middle class, not billionaires. Bezos might be worth a million times more than the average person, but he’s not buying a million times more housing or Disney tickets or hotel rooms. Instead, the average person is competing directly with the increasingly affluent top 10% for access to those finite resources.