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Comment by unreal37 | Hacker News Reader

$300 million in 1986 is $750 million in today's dollars.

Still seems like the rate of wealth of the richest 100 has exceeded inflation by 8X... Which is fine, just interesting.

I wouldn't say it's "fine". The well-documented increasing wealth-inequality is going to be a major problem to solve in the next century. As automation becomes more prevalent, it will only get worse with the money ultimately going to fewer and fewer hands.

It seems like the relevant problems to solve are 1) how to provide enough support to all people so that the "floor" isn't so low as to be despairing and 2) how to help people to be mindful that sometimes, you will not be on top of the pile, and that's OK.

Inequality itself is a function of the uncounted dimensions of comparison amongst humans. Wealth is just a proxy target for this underlying fact. Make wealth equal by the most gentle mechanisms imaginable and the dynamics will just shift to some other dimension. It's like whack-a-mole with abstract concepts we barely understand baked into our monkey brains.

One quote I saw somewhere said something like "if inequality grows too extreme, you will have the choice of redistributing wealth through taxation, or redistributing poverty through revolution".

I had never thought of poverty as something one could distribute, so that quote has stuck with me.

Your instincts are correct: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/08/plutocrats-rise...

"Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich by Chrystia Freeland – review

A necessary and at times depressing book about the staggeringly wealthy"

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