Errr, not really? I mean, at a minimum you're making a somewhat controversial statement - lots of people (me included) wouldn't automatically agree that the rich get richer, especially if you're thinking "only" the rich get richer, which is what is implied by the comment above. (As evidence, see established companies that go bankrupt, and new startups which rise from nothing to become dominant players, much like Google itself, which has existed for a relatively brief period, or something like Uber).
So let's hope that data capitalism is like regular capitalism!
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-ft-gra...
On growing income inequality and the transfer of wealth to the 1%.
You can argue if it's right or wrong but it's a bit of whopper to say it doesn't happen.
As a teaser, one important thing is to not share information (i.e. Don't blog about financial "hacks"). Call it a corrupt moral compass or whatever you like, but the fact is this behavior is rampant.
That something so important is decided at an early level of one's life that has wide reaching implications is quite frankly a disgrace.
Only the most endeavours break the cycle and they are too few and far between that are not really encouraged on most levels of society around the world due to the norms.
the vast majority of financial tricks require scale (of capital) - e.g. itemized deductions, business expenses, even tax-loss harvesting - but they aren't secret!
Also, I don't think anyone knows the exact causes of this growing inequality - some libertarians, for example, would argue that it's excessive regulation that is causing part of the problem - which isn't capitalism, it's the opposite of capitalism.
But most importantly, note that I specifically talked most strongly against the idea that only the rich get richer. Just as an example, how many of today's billionaires are relatively new to the game? It's not all of them, not by a long shot. And while some minimum level of "being rich" is certainly a factor (in the send that everyone who lives in a 1st-world country is rich), there are lots of people on that list who started with relatively little.
One of Piketty's points is the relationship between the rate of growth of the economy, `g`, and the rate of return on capital, `r`. If the rate of return of capital exceeds the rate of growth of the economy, that is `r > g`, then inequality of wealth increases over time. As they say, "the rich get richer".
These conditions (`r>g`) have been observed from historical data under normal conditions (excluding events like world wars), and we expect them to continue into the future, particularly with projections of declining or stabilising global economic growth rates [1].
The period after the two world wars (with relatively high equality) is unusual in history and over we're seeing inequality of wealth increase, inherited capital becoming an increasingly relevant factor, etc.
[1] let's ignore the other perspective of whether continual economic growth is actually feasible or desirable given the reality of hard environmental limits.
Wealth is effectively "liquid power" and "power" is the ability to get other people do to what you want. One of the absolute most obvious things you'd want them to do is... give you more power.
So I think it's a pretty natural outcome that, absence other forces, any power imbalance will tend to magnify over time.
Times in history where the entire economy is growing very fast basically mean new power is raining down on all people uniformly. That will tend to reduce disparity in the same way that adding the same positive number to both the numerator and denominator leads to a fraction closer to one.
Of course, this simplified model treats every person as an island. Where the story gets more complex is when you consider people working together in a group. And I think through most of history when you've seen power imbalances get reduced, it's because you've seen people work together to form groups that have greater power than the smaller number of individuals they are pushing against.
One of the things that really scares me about the US today is how much we've culturally lost that ability to organize and work together. And, of course, the small number of increasingly powerful people and groups like it that way, as they always have.
But the dynamic I have described is certainly there. And it can become dominant.
To truly see who is more fit, I propose that we take a group of 12, 6 from each class, and drop them off on an uninhabited island. We will places weapons and traps at strategic locations. We shall call this experiment Project Craving Romp.