Showing posts with label wealth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wealth. Show all posts

Monday, 4 August 2025

Inheritance Tax Is Largely Irrelevant to the Problem of Economic Inequality


Lots of people think that a few people controlling a very large share of a society's economic power is a bad thing. It is unfair that some should have so much while so many have so much less. It is inefficient that so much wealth lies in the hands of people who already have everything they could reasonably desire. It gives some people an outsized influence on decisions that affect the whole society, and on democratic politics itself (previously). And so on.

These people often also worry that economic inequality is increasing and becoming entrenched as the rich pass their excessive wealth on to their children and more and more wealth ends up concentrated in ever fewer hands. Many of them think increasing inheritance tax is necessary to stop this. But this solution relies on a mistaken understanding of how wealth is actually transmitted between generations.

Friday, 27 December 2024

Billionaires Are Not As Rich As We And They Like To Pretend


The Scrooge McDuck model of obscene wealth, as propagated by inequality activists 
There are supposedly more than 2,500 billionaires in the world these days. While I certainly agree that these people are very very rich, it is important to be clear that they are not as rich as the infographics put about by the likes of Oxfam imply. The wealth of billionaires is largely theoretical - an accounting construction built upon generous assumptions rather than a literal pile of money. It would be more accurate to simply call them the super rich.