inequality (≠)

I wrote this post 4/13/2019 and never published it. I guess I thought it needed more work, or maybe me to do some math.

Well, somebody recently did some of these calculations for the US since 1975.

Guess what? The 1% owes the rest of us $50T. Not surprising.

My unpublished post:

Take the integral back through time of percentage of value of labor by workers vs owners. This is how much the 1% owes to the rest of us. Because if we reward labor more equitably for the last 200 years, those increases are going to seriously compound and put much more of the generated capital in the accounts of the workers vs those of the owners. Break it up into 5 segments:

1. 0.01%
2. 1%
3. 10%
4. 11-50%
5. bottom 50%

For every civilization back to the 1st, estimate GDP numbers, then assign shares to the 5 levels of society. Oops, hard part, figure out how wealth gets distributed between civilizations. Run with estimated real numbers for our history. Then make numbers just a bit more equitable, and rerun and compute how much extra wealth the higher levels stole from the lower levels.

Remember, like in the "egalitarian" US, in 1681 King Charles II of England gave William Penn the whole, fucking state of Pennsylvania, free and clear. I'm sure Penn & his descendants did not get a huge, huge advantage from that [sarcasm].

So if we did the math back 6000 years, & figured out how much the alphas, "nobility", kings, etc., have ripped us off, what would that number be? Current net worth of the world, ~$1000T. Probably pretty close to that. I mean, after all they are the 1%. If things were equitable, they would have $10T of the $1000T, the rest of us would have $990T. Instead, they have $500T, the next 49% of us have a similar amount, but those of us in the bottom 50% have pretty much 0 or negative.

Time for some payback, IMO.