RE: Wealth Inequality
Thx for the reply, the Bloomberg article is great.
Are you sure about inheritance diluting wealth?
You can see, the oldest/richest families from Renaissance Italy went maybe through 20 generations so far. That's a long time, but mathematically still within the range of normal. Considering a generation losing the fortune is at 10%, then right now the man has a likelihood of 10% passing on the wealth. Well, he has a 99.99% chance, but considering the past generations, his children have that 10% likelihood to pass it on to his grand children.
In the example you can also see how you can beat time and disaster:
- acknowledging that it is not yours, you're only the administrator
- not splitting up the tangibles, but keeping homogeneous investments and focus on classic products
- (this is done by the Rothschilds) marry your cousins 2nd+ grade
- overall: risk minimization becomes dominant compared to return maximization
These families get that all right. But, how many families manage to set up such a mentality in the first place and then pass it on and keep it up?
Look at the Tetrapak Rausings (who died from street meth instead of simply buying a big pharma company) or in Germany not too long ago Madeleine Schickedanz who burned through several Billions by ruining Germany's pre-Internet Amazon. Or an example here from steemit: @samstonehill who's father got screwed out of his fortune.
Unfortunately, the article only shows who inherits the Billions but not who loses them over-generationally...
Singapore also collect land rent instead of excessive taxes on income. Value capturing unearned income instead of taxes on earned income doesn’t hurt the economy in the same way. This is in my opinion the main reason Singapore is successful.
Low income taxes are always important for success. Liechtenstein, Andorra and others show comparable success with that. But I'm not sure if the land tax can be generalized to larger entities. Singapore is small and has a high density, which makes land a very scarce commodity (while the accounting is very simple).
Perhaps the equivalent for big countries would be access to fast transportation, aka road tolls for highways or a special tax for fast intercity trains and planes.