Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

When people traded chickens, even the very best chicken farmer couldn't make more than 10 times any other chicken farmer, it just wasn't physically possible, but then imaginary money came along and now the difference in incomes can be astronomical. The concept of a meritocracy, where the most productive people receive the greatest rewards, was established in the days of chickens to encourage a society's work ethic, but it hasn't translated well into the age of abstraction. In fact, now the connection between merit and reward has become so tenuous that work ethic is no longer the determining factor; the very best worker receives perhaps double the rewards of fellow workers, and one-thousandth the rewards of the money manipulators.

The Baby-Boomers grew accustomed to relative wage growth from the early 1960s until this century, which created a Middle Class primarily made of wage earners, and set the expectations of following generations, but that wage growth not only stopped, it has since declined back to 1960s levels. Now the Middle Class is primarily made of professionals and small business owners who resist higher wages. Still though, the difference in income between these groups is still within chicken farmer understanding. However, the leveragers of capital, the so-called Capitalists, raise no chickens, and perform no service that justifies the vast income and wealth disparity. Their good fortune instead derives from ever more convoluted ways to benefit from the magic of compounded gains while at the same time passing the risk onto the rest of society, which wouldn't be possible with chickens.