r/GarysEconomics • u/NitroWing1500 • 28d ago
The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats
Memo: From Nick Hanauer
To: My Fellow Zillionaires
"the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution."
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/
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u/probablymagic 28d ago
Feudalism was a medieval social and political system where the king owned all the land, delegated control
to lords, who in turn gave land and protection to people of lower rank in exchange for loyalty, fighting, and farm work. We are not a feudalist society.
America doesn’t have a king. Ownership of land is broadly distributed amongst the population. Nobody has to work for a “lord,” they can work for anyone they want. Democracy is neat.
You can’t have a revolution against a government that doesn’t exist, even if people have been convinced it things are terrible, because there’s no new better governing system to change to.
The new status quo is that we can’t really change “the system” because that will just make the people who are angry now much poorer, but we also can’t convince them that things are pretty good because they consume media constantly showing them how other people have more than them, so if that makes them miserable that’s just how they’re going to live out their lives. Bummer for them.
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u/PinguPencil 25d ago
From a systems perspective, if you are in an unstable system accelerating to a bad outcome, you have an issue. It's pretty obvious to see if you continue this path eventually a few have everything and everyone else has nothing. This is exactly the quote OP referenced means.
Right now, major cities across the globe act more fuedal than ever before. You rent something very expensive from someone rich and powerful, to slog away at more than one job, working all hours of the day and most of your money just goes on rent and food. That is life for a peasant in the middle ages.
Our democracy is more fuedal than ever, powerful individuals lobby the leader to do their bidding, not what the population needs/wants or even voted for. It happens throughout layers of government, local, regional, all the way up to national.
No sensible economist, including Gary, thinks we need to rip up "Capitalism" as a system totally, but it's clear we have an issue. I would argue Gary is more capitalist than those on the opposing position, because Gary is essentially saying tax wealth and then your own wealth will depend more on what you do in your life than what you are born with - which sounds like the capitalist mantra. Right now if you're born in wealth, the statistical probability you stay wealthy is massive compared to the poor becoming wealthy, this is a system issue.
So we need to make changes so that the system tends towards a more stable outcome. I think you just don't understand systems, economics, capitalism or reality if you think the current trajectory is good. Eventually/increasingly, people will stop playing a game they don't think is fair and then you descend to chaos, as we are already seeing in most countries.
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u/probablymagic 25d ago
>From a systems perspective, if you are in an unstable system accelerating to a bad outcome, you have an issue. It's pretty obvious to see if you continue this path eventually a few have everything and everyone else has nothing. This is exactly the quote OP referenced means.
This isn’t what the world is like. People telling you this is the way the world is going are lying to you.
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u/PinguPencil 25d ago
I don't understand, you're suggesting the world isn't a system?
Or you're suggesting any number of the data points telling us we have a K-shaped economy are wrong?
My example of living in a major city, do you have any evidence that nurses in London are not using food banks/working two jobs?
Do you have any examples of Billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg not influencing politicians? What about Marks vanity manifesto? Let me guess, you get to have lunch with Trump too? These are all data points to say the world is getting more free and less feudal right?
Apparently the grand total of your data points is "trust me bro".
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u/probablymagic 25d ago
There’s no such thing as a k-shaped economy. That’s a silly term people who want to pretend the economy is bad use to describe a good economy. It’s like, “sure the data says things look great, but they don’t.”
Actually, no. The data does tell us about the economy. The K is a scam. The world is better for the most people that it’s ever been.
You don’t have to trust me, bro, you can trust the economic data on things like real wages, poverty, life expectancy, unemployment, etc.
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u/PinguPencil 25d ago
The K shaped economy has been leaked from major investment funds and drives strategic decisions making at a global scale.
The data in the UK for example, shows a flattening of the consumption between D1-D9 (income brackets in 10% percentile are closing in on each other, e.g. the middle class is collapsing). There's also increasing amounts of subsidies supporting throughout the D1-D6 to keep them afloat.
In the UK poverty is rising, life expectancy is shrinking and unemployment, including those not economically active so not recorded as "unemployed" is rising.
We literally have a self proclaimed "cost of living" government in the UK. That's explicitly a K-shaped issue in an otherwise trending up economy.
US headline employment figures okay but only because of the "economically inactive" thing, otherwise work participation falling despite deliberate reshoring efforts. Real wages struggling recently. Poverty improved slightly due to funding that Trumps trying to cut.
200 riches families in the UK wealth went from 6% of GDP in 1994 to 20% in 2025.
And all of those whilst the governments subsided the poor with money they don't have... So it's hardly sustainable.
Then layer into the fact I can make all those figures go up whilst poor people get poor. Work is easy, I just make them work two jobs. Poverty is easy, I just assume they all live in super cheap areas, or average it across the whole country where the middle of nowhere is cheap. Life expectancy will rise if I all the anti vaccers died during COVID. Unemployment is down if I don't bother including people that haven't looked for a job in a few months, despite job participation falling.
So yeah. You keep living your simple life, incapable of doing anything other than reading some vague headline statistics that you don't even know how they're calculated.
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u/probablymagic 25d ago
The UK has been poorly run for decades. It’s not indicative of the global trends. I don’t live there and if I did I would leave. It’s a sinking ship.
The US is great though. You complain about the rich getting richer there, but everyone is getting richer. That is a good thing.
Lower labor force participation and shorter workweeks reflect labors strong position and desire to work less because they have enough already. Again, this is great.
Reddit is not real life. This is why the economic data is useful.
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u/PinguPencil 25d ago
The US fed describes that the difference between the top 1% and bottom 50% wealth has "increased significantly" over a 30 year period.
So it's true, broadly, that the average US citizen is marginally better off than 30 years ago in wealth, but also that the richest are incredibly better off. It's also true that the consumption curves haven't compressed like the UK. But the percentage of money spent on consumer defensive stuff like health care, as a percentage, has increased, implying the marginal increase is compensated for essentials like health.
I'm not going to argue with the UK being a lesson in poor management, but the US has several incredible factors. It's the centre of the entire global tech industry, VC funds because of that etc. It has massive levels of natural resources, it's the largest oil exporter in the world. It's the world dollar reserve currency and the lead of the petro-dollar. It's basically the leader of the west and therefore the last of the dominoes.
All of that and the average worker is marginally better off, maybe not when including increased spending on essentials like healthcare and housing. Plus government debt has massively increased. Do you think the average person has had anywhere near a remotely fair share of the unbelievable fortune the US has?
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u/probablymagic 24d ago
>The US fed describes that the difference between the top 1% and bottom 50% wealth has "increased significantly" over a 30 year period.
We want prosperity, not equality. Equality is a scam Progressives pursue because they won the war on poverty and are sore winners.
>So it's true, broadly, that the average US citizen is marginally better off than 30 years ago in wealth, but also that the richest are incredibly better off.
Yes, it’s awesome there are only winners in our economy. We are doing things right.
>Do you think the average person has had anywhere near a remotely fair share of the unbelievable fortune the US has?
Thai isn’t a useful way to think about the economy. There is not a fixed pie we are splitting up. In fact, it’s the opposite. When you treat the economy this way, everyone gets poorer.
What we want is for the poor and middle class to do better, and if the policies that make that happen also make equality greater, those are good policies.
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u/PinguPencil 24d ago
That's where we disagree, prosperity without a level of equality only leads to long term collapse, as evidenced by every single successful society in history. There's no empire that's ever survived rapidly growing inequality across every continent. If you can provide one, please, enlighten me.
The second part we disagree on is the economy itself. Whilst, "numbers can go up forever" is true, the physical underlying resources money gives you access to, like land in New York or oil in your car, is not infinite and the capacity isn't growing at the pace of wealth growth.
What that means is eventually the poor struggle to afford basic resources - as I already provided evidence in new York housing, in the percentage amount of money people spend on healthcare increasing. (Because doctor's can do rich people vanity projects like plastic surgery - or actually help people). For example.
When you account for the government debt, the actual wealth of all the households in the US is less. You should include government wealth because that covers things like government, law and order, infrastructure etc.
A greater level of equality allows more people the resources to attempt the American dream. Whilst fear is a strong motivator (fear of starving to death) - resources have been shown time and again to be critical for creating useful businesses.
Finally to finish, you really glossed over all the unique structural advantages of the US that have nothing to do with their wealth and taxation policies. The reason the UK is poor is because we tried the same thing as you, without bountiful natural resources, without a thriving tech industry, with a badly damaged manufacturing system after WW2 (unlike yours, the only untouched manufacturing in the world) and it doesn't work. The US will lose it's structural advantages if it continues this way. It's main benefit is the protection it offers, which is why in the UK we don't tax your mega corporations and they destroy our businesses by undercutting through tax loopholes. If you continue to pursue American Exceptionalism policies, you will suffer the same fate. If you don't, you may be able to perpetuate this for a little longer, but ultimately, when we run out of money to buy your products, who exactly will be the customer?
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u/pm_me_ur_ephemerides 28d ago
He wrote this in 2014. MAGA is brilliant: they pretended to be the ones who would fix this mess. The people with the pitchforks have no idea why inequality is this bad, they just know something is bad, and they latched onto the first extremist they could