Challenging each other to cage fights, building apocalypse bunkers – the behaviour of today’s mega-moguls is becoming increasingly outlandish and imperial
Those are two contradicting statements. Or maybe they aren’t, maybe the rest of the world is poorer?
Oddly enough, while their schemes are certainly more outlandish, on an individual basis today’s tech billionaires are not any wealthier than their early 20th-century counterparts. Adjusted for inflation, John Rockefeller’s fortune of $336bn and Andrew Carnegie’s $309bn exceed Musk’s $231bn, Bezos’s $165bn and Gates’s $114bn.
But, as chronicled by Peter Turchin in End Times, his book on elite excess and what it portends, today there are far more centimillionaires and billionaires than there were in the gilded age, and they have collectively accumulated a much larger proportion of the world’s wealth.
Sounds to me like the individual most-megabillionaires of today aren’t as rich as their individual predecessors, but there are a lot more super-wealthy people in general and the general populace is poorer on average.
Unless I missed it, your quote only mentions the comparative wealth of modern robber barons to their predecessors, and not the comparative poverty faced by the world today. So when you said, as I understood it, maybe today’s robber barons aren’t any wealthier than their predecessors but that the rest of the world is poorer (comparatively speaking) than in previous times, I said I believe that the rest of the world has gotten poorer than it has been before due to what I perceive as current robber barons working to hoarding away resources from the rest of the world’s current availability. I hope this makes sense.
It means the absolute richest are not as rich as a hundred years ago…but there are a lot more of the very rich that don’t quite reach the lofty heights of those top ones, which means overall, more wealth is in the hands of people with over a hundred million dollars.
Those are two contradicting statements. Or maybe they aren’t, maybe the rest of the world is poorer?
Sounds to me like the individual most-megabillionaires of today aren’t as rich as their individual predecessors, but there are a lot more super-wealthy people in general and the general populace is poorer on average.
It’s the latter.
So the common person is poorer than the people around during the age of the robber baron?
Unless I missed it, your quote only mentions the comparative wealth of modern robber barons to their predecessors, and not the comparative poverty faced by the world today. So when you said, as I understood it, maybe today’s robber barons aren’t any wealthier than their predecessors but that the rest of the world is poorer (comparatively speaking) than in previous times, I said I believe that the rest of the world has gotten poorer than it has been before due to what I perceive as current robber barons working to hoarding away resources from the rest of the world’s current availability. I hope this makes sense.
Yes
It means the absolute richest are not as rich as a hundred years ago…but there are a lot more of the very rich that don’t quite reach the lofty heights of those top ones, which means overall, more wealth is in the hands of people with over a hundred million dollars.