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"Although today high levels of inequality in the United States remain a pressing concern for a large swath of the population, monetary policy and credit expansion are rarely mentioned as a likely source of rising wealth and income inequality. [...]
The rise in income inequality over the past 30 years has to a significant extent been the product of monetary policies fueling a series of asset price bubbles. Whenever the market booms, the share of income going to those at the very top increases.[...]
[F]inancial institutions benefit disproportionately from money creation, since they can purchase more goods, services, and assets for still relatively low prices. This conclusion is backed by numerous empirical illustrations. For instance, the financial sector contributed massively to the growth of billionaire's wealth"
Source: https://mises.org/library/how-central-banking-increased-inequality
I'll leave my comments as comments, but note that The Mises Institute is proudly, one might say almost by definition, Austrian School. Both the Institute and the School have had their fair share of criticism. Which of course doesn't mean that individual author is wrong on this particular matter. -- Ed.(FP)
(Score: 1) by pdfernhout on Wednesday August 23 2017, @12:08AM (3 children)
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm [primitivism.com]
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times. ...
[lots of substantiating amthropological evidence snipped...]
Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions -- but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 3, Informative) by SanityCheck on Wednesday August 23 2017, @12:51AM
Unlike gender and race, poverty is the true "social construct." And this truth is the source of all the Left projections.
As a side note, I don't know to what extent being hungry is actually a proper state of being. I'd assume in natural conditions Humans should be hungry at least half the time. It is a new fad that some home huger is evil, just like pain. When I was younger I would be hungry for hours on end, it didn't even bother me. I could fast for a day or two easily. It gets a bit harder in my slightly more advanced years.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 23 2017, @01:17AM
Except, of course, when those wants weren't easily satisfied. You could starve to death from a week of bad luck or die in a brutal attack by your neighbors. I'll note here that reading actual stories by hunter-gatherer tribes indicates a strong focus on survival. That indicates to me that living day-to-day was a far less certain thing than it is today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @09:01AM
In a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, even half of current humanity wouldn't get enough to eat, because the amount of land, and the amount of food that land produces if not artificially improved, are naturally limited. But then, it wasn't a problem back then because enough people would die from illnesses (often already in their first year of life), or get killed by animals, or be killed by a member of another tribe, and therefore the number of humans was quite limited.