alt Hacker NewsPolitical movements we are talking about were result of rapidly worsening living conditions for large groups of people. They did not necessary followed technological progress, technological progress was not necessary condition for their existence.
Nor were they result of a new abundance.
> When considering prosperity, it's important to emphasise what's real.
Yes. And what did actually happened in the past.
> So what if Warren Buffett owns a massive number of shares in notionally highly valued corporations?
Meanwhile, Warren Buffett : "There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."
The accumulation of power and money by smaller group of people means loss of power by the rest people. Those with power then use it to their own benefit while rest of us dont have that option. This result in the small group having even more power, while needs and wants of the rest of us are ignored. In turn, it means worsening conditions for the people on the loosing side.
And you see this process happening as we speak here. You see it at political decisions being made by the administration, at climate change approach, at unaccountability of the Epstein group of friends, at wars for oil, at decay of the democracy.
Materially you see K shaped economy, in us being unable to buy RAM and electronics, loosing rights, loosing control of devices to the corporations, basic necessities getting more expensive and so on.
That is a pile of unrelated grievances pretending to be an economic argument. Once again, your fixation on politics obscures the central point: politics can redistribute production; it cannot redistribute what has not been produced.
The RAM example is particularly absurd. Two decades ago, ordinary consumers were not complaining about the price of 64 or 128 GB of RAM because owning that much was barely imaginable. You are complaining about access to a product that exists only because capitalism drove extraordinary technological progress. Obsessing over RAM shows a lack of historical perspective and a badly distorted idea of what constitutes a good life.
Yes, concentrated wealth means Warren Buffett has a disproportionately large share of influence. But that does not mean Warren Buffett also consumes a disproportionately large share of the resources that represent human flourishing. Ownership, political power, and physical consumption are different things. Corporate shares are not sandwiches ripped from the mouths of children.
And blaming every disliked event, from wars to Epstein to electronics prices, on conspiracies involving the ultra-wealthy is exactly the kind of unhinged, zero-sum populism that corrodes democracy. Instead of evidence and analysis, we're given a third rate morality play about a wicked elite stealing everything from "the people". Extreme polarisation and populist thinking are corrosive forces in modern society.