> it's the seriously rich that have taken all of the spoils, that's where the massive imbalance is.

It depends on how you define “spoils.” People define it to include notional paper wealth, and I think that doesn’t reflect the actual mechanics of economic imbalance. On paper, NVIDIA’s shareholders have increased their wealth by $4.8 trillion in five years, enough to buy all the residential real estate in New York City and LA combined. But $5 trillion in notional AI wealth isn’t actually the same as owning NYC and LA. The paper wealth doesn’t affect the average person meaningfully until someone actually buys something with it.

Given that, it’s more useful to define “spoils” in terms of finite goods and services and look at spending on those goods and services. That is what directly affects the average person—it’s what makes housing or education or Disney tickets or whatever harder to access.

And on that front, the income growth of the top 10% has had a much more significant impact on the average person. The top 10% accounts for half of consumer spending today, up from 35% in the 1990s. And that spending is coming from the upper middle class, not billionaires. Bezos might be worth a million times more than the average person, but he’s not buying a million times more housing or Disney tickets or hotel rooms. Instead, the average person is competing directly with the increasingly affluent top 10% for access to those finite resources.

The bigger issue is weak competition. When a few companies dominate a market, they can raise prices, suppress wages, and capture more of the gains from economic growth.

That is also a big part of why wealth has become so concentrated at the top. If there were ten real cloud competitors, eight GPU makers, or several serious Office competitors, those companies would have a much harder time keeping such a large share of the profit. Instead, concentrated markets create enormous profits, and concentrated ownership turns those profits into enormous fortunes.

In my opinion, that has a bigger impact on the bottom 90%, and even on the upper middle 10% you are talking about, than the direct consumption of the top 10% ever could. It would be much better to raise the purchasing power of the bottom 90% than to reduce the consumption of the top 10%.

This is really a point that I think goes so misunderstood by so many. Yes billionaire's are bad, but people making 3x the median have a much bigger impact on those making median or less.