The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century

by Ryan Avent

The re-forging of society is not a rapid process. For that reason, the full exploitation of the possibilities presented by a new technology takes a very long while.

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Economic exclusion is not always central to the narrative used to explain and justify discrimination, but it is practically always a motivation where such discrimination does occur.

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The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn’t rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can. That is not a radical statement. People take what they can take, and it is only the interplay of countervailing forces and the tolerance of the masses that limits that impulse – that works to create institutions that limit that impulse.