One of the most disturbing trends in this country is the rise of extreme wealth and income inequality.
As the following charts show, America is rapidly becoming a country of a few million overlords and three hundred million serfs.
Unfortunately, this issue has been politicized, which means that people don't think about the implications of it — they just start yelling.
But extreme inequality is bad for everyone, even the overlords.
Why?
Because when inequality gets bad enough, serfs don't have much money to buy products from overlords. This hurts the overlords' ability to get even richer.
(That's what's wrong with the American economy right now. The serfs are tapped out. The overlords are responding by firing more serfs, to increase profits. Unfortunately, because one person's "costs" are another person's "wages,"this is making the problem worse.)
The best way to fix inequality is not to tax most of the overlords' money and give it to the serfs. That just inflames "class warfare" and gets people yelling about "socialism."
The best way to fix inequality is to persuade the overlords that it is in their best interests to share more of their wealth by paying their employees more for their hard work (work that, not incidentally, is what makes the overlords rich).
In other words, the best way to change this is to persuade companies that it's better to focus on creating value rather than just profit.
Persuading America's overlords to do this will take a while, though.
In the meantime, it's important that everyone understand just how extreme the inequality in this country has become.
It's way worse than most people think it should be. And it's way worse than most people think.
The following screenshots from a video created by a pseudonymous videographer called "Politizane" shows this in detail. You can watch the video here or at the end of this presentation. There's one criticism that I'll address at the end, but the basic message is correct:
A couple of years ago, professors Dan Ariely and Michael Norton asked 5,000 Americans about wealth and inequality.
They wanted to see what wealth distribution Americans thought would be IDEAL ... and then compare this to the ACTUAL distribution.
To illustrate the findings, a videographer named "Politizane" reduced America's population to "quintiles" based on their wealth. ("Bottom 20%, Top 20%, etc.)
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