Yeah, this is a pretty tenuous argument, and seems to confuse the difference between wage and wealth inequality. But whatever, a few points that I cannot be bothered to structure into an argument.
- Trying to differentiate liquid and non-liquid wealth is silly, if I own a house, that makes me richer than someone who doesn't, even if the cash isn't immediately available - the same goes for shares.
- As we all know, wealth increases in value at a faster rate than either economic growth or wages, so someone whose wealth is largely in assets is going to see their wealth increase at a faster rate than someone who relies on a salary
- It is a fact that wage growth has stalled while there has been significant asset price inflation
- It is a fact that wages have dropped as an overall percentage of the economy, claiming this is down to technological improvements is a bit odd, as economic growth should lead to an increase in demand as well as supply - it is clearly much more down to removing bargaining power form the "labour" side of the market, to the advantage of capital owners
- The difference between CEO, or executive pay, has skyrocketed in the last few decades - from 25 times as high in the 1960s to 300 times as high now. So objectively speaking there has been a regression
- This is compounded by the fact that much of executive pay is in the form of assets (share options etc) which, as mentioned above, accrue in value much faster than the economy has been
- on the flip side, home ownership, the traditional route to wealth for the middle class, is on the decline - in part because it has become prohibititavely expensive in the developed world's major agglomerations. In conjunction with this, for a "normal" person to access home ownership, they generally have buy outside of the major urban areas which places them in the dual trap of:
a) being removed from the locations where property value are rising the fastest (ie big cities), thus causing them to fall further behind in terms of their ability to amass wealth
b) removing them from access to the labour markets of the major metros, exacerbating inequality as they have to settle for lower wages
except the price of your house wont drop by more than 50% if you sold your house.
If Bezos says hes going to sell all his shares in Amazon, he would get maybe about 1/3 of what they are worth now(and that is before taxes).
