Comparing absolute numbers to nothing isn't very meaningful. You compare your $340 billion to the almost a hundred trillion dollars in US total net worth and the amount that went somewhere else is above 99%.
To get to the numbers like "1% of people own 40% of the wealth" you have to go the 1%, which is to say about three million people, and then you're including a bunch of doctors and software engineers who are clearly not in the same box as the Walton and Mars families.
Then you're comparing the sum total of the wealth of many of the richest families to that of one individual person.
The fact that rich people have a lot of money is not really a recent development. But it's the focus on the super rich which is missing the thread.
If housing prices go up, people at the 25th percentile lose and people at the 75th percentile gain. We see the loss for the people at the 25th percentile and recognize it as a problem, but then people are pretending like we can just take the money "back" from the Walton family even though that's not where most of it actually went.
It went to home price appreciation for a bunch of middle aged and retired sociologists and car dealership managers and dental hygienists. If you want them to give it back so the poor aren't so poor then you have to recognize that and thereby identify who it is you really have to fight over that money.
My point was that Sam Walton didn't seem to exactly price in carbon when he went to market with wal-mart in the 70s. Had he, maybe the price and selection would not have resulted in that degree of wealth extraction (generation), the same could be true for Ikea tables, Amazon Prime 1 day toothbrush, Sugar and chemicals for candy, Pesticides on crops, Opioids, red meat, etc. We got exactly what we wanted, loads of new cheap stuff with loads of selection at our convenience. We also got a labor crisis, a health epidemic, climate change and massive knowledge and wealth inequality.
> Had he, maybe the price and selection would not have resulted in that degree of wealth extraction (generation)
Not really. The profit on buying for $8 and selling for $11 is about the same as on buying for $9 and selling for $12. You make a little less, because there is lower demand and you have higher initial capital costs for inventory, but it's only a marginal difference.
The reason they don't do it regardless is that if Sam Walton tries selling only the carbon-priced thing for $12 when some competitor is selling the bad thing for $11, the customer chooses the lower price. There is still a Walmart-shaped thing in the economy whether or not it's called Walmart and founded by Sam Walton, because most customers choose that over the thing that costs more.
Because they have instant personal feedback into the price and the taste but not into the long-term health effects of sugar and red meat. But if you can solve that for voters then doesn't the same solution work for customers?
What I'm saying is that you would have to convince people that red meat is bad for them before they'd be willing to pass a law against it. If they're not convinced of that then they'll just buy it from whoever sells it and it doesn't matter if one seller here or there carries it or not as long as somebody does, which somebody will as long as people want it. But if you successfully convince them that it's so bad for them that it should be illegal, wouldn't they just stop buying it at that point, even without a law or any action by retailers?
I see. I agree with that point generally. I think we're talking past each other? I'm thinking about the morality and ethics of a supply chain and how it's disclosed/understood. Where should we be working to offload the understanding of how vast humans in a societal context impact ecology?
What I'm saying is that the upper middle class (e.g. the top quartile excluding billionaires) has more money than the upper class (billionaires), because there are so many more people in it. Tens of millions rather than a couple thousand. But then they're regular people, doctors and engineers, one out of every four Americans.
That's because the bottom 50% of the country own almost nothing. They rent and have debts. The net worth of the entire bottom quintile is negative -- if you have a dollar in your pocket you don't owe to someone then you have more wealth than the bottom 20% of the country.
