Soaring wealth inequality is the surest sign of falling prices. You can’t have the latter without the former.
Look at the richest Americans, then and now. John D. Rockefeller mass produced kerosene and the gasoline that powered the formerly obscure cars made common by Henry Ford. Michael Dell put personal computers in every house, while Steve Jobs put supercomputers in every pocket. Sam Walton and Walmart, along with Jeff Bezos and Amazon, made the world’s production available to anyone anywhere. Jensen Huang has literally made the collective commercial genius of Silicon Valley available to us all, and essentially at no cost.
It’s worth remembering as the pundit class makes the “K-Shaped Economy” the crisis du jour. Implied in this silly notion is that the rich are getting richer on the backs of the poor. No, that’s an impossibility.
As the wealth creators then and now reveal brightly, the greatest fortunes are almost invariably an effect of mass producing impossible-to-get luxuries. If you’re doubtful, and in particular if you were born before 1983, simply recall when you first saw someone talking wirelessly on a brick-sized Motorola phone.
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