If I use the S&P 500 instead (easier calculation given available data for me), the the FANG is a huge portion. (Yes, 5 companies out of 500 are by definition 1/100.) No argument about headcount, though.
Take a look at the second chart (bottom of "Page 1", the third actual page considering the title page and contents page). [0]
Revenue may be small, but profits are huge, and market capitalization (aka "wealth") is absolutely massive. And that market cap is what feeds retirement plans & pensions. So while Europe is taxing people, the US is growing profits and wealth.
The World Economic Forum had this to say about Europe's tech giants in 2017: "In total more than a third of European tech founders are based in the UK." [1] That doesn't bode well for the future, when your economy is stuck in old industries, and the leader is leaving the party.
BTW, hats off to the Finns - not sure what they are doing with gaming, but they punch well above their weight.
When it comes to creating wealth, taxation doesn't do anything but redistribute it. In order to actually generate wealth, you need capital, and people who use that capital more efficiently & effectively will become richer. It is a virtuous spiral. And what's important is that every one of those high paying tech jobs is one less low-paying job. Most of the low paying jobs have existed for decades in various industries (esp retail), but most of those tech jobs didn't exist 20 years ago. I can only imagine how many high paying tech jobs there will be in the US in 20 more years, even though I expect low-paying jobs to still outnumber them.
> When it comes to creating wealth, taxation doesn't do anything but redistribute it. In order to actually generate wealth, you need capital, and people who use that capital more efficiently & effectively will become richer. It is a virtuous spiral.
Sure, it's a virtuous spiral if you're one of the minuscule number of people that the spiral is pointing to. Otherwise, you see it for what it is, wealth being siphoned from Us to Them.
Also, the level of political control that huge companies almost automatically exert greatly minimizes democracy, leading to things like the bottom 50% of Americans having almost no bearing on the political sphere, at least at the federal and state levels.
Do you actually believe that? How much money will I get from 1 share? How much money would I have to invest before my fortunes actually rise with the real fortunes of any particular company?
That is the principle and it works. I know countless examples, yes, including me.
Not happy with 1 share? Save more, buy more.
Want cheaper shares? Found your own company and you’ll have infinite shares for free. You’ll have to make it successful afterwards, though, to raise each share's value up from 0. That’s what "They" did.
> Save more, buy more.
> Found your own company and you’ll have infinite shares for free.
You seriously misunderstand how little money people at the bottom actually have, and how little access to the kind of credit you'd need to start a business. Like, saving for a car when their old one breaks down will probably take some people months or years. Saving to buy shares????
> That’s what "They" did.
A minuscule handful of them, if even that. For every Jack Ma there's a thousand Mark Zuckerbergs or Bill Gatess who were born with a silver spoon and will die with a silver spoon, as will 3 generations of their children at the very least. The descendants of the people who laid the railroad tracks, the large slave plantations, all of these people are the vast majority of the top. Even people like Elon Musk are still coming from a background of pretty high privilege. The people who were born in the bottom 50% that you have ever heard of (outside show-business) can probably be counted on at most a few people's hands.
For every story of entrepreneurial success, there are countless others of failures. The vast majority of people are not just too dumb to see the opportunities, as you have arrogance to imply. They are well aware of the risks, and can't afford to take them.
Plus, an economy can't run on business founders alone. It requires workers that actually, you know, do the work, and who are willing to be paid for a less than that work is worth (you know, 'profit').
If anyone is living in an echo chamber, I assure you it is not the 99%. It's the smug 1% hoarding wealth and justifying it to themselves by thinking 'anyone could do this if they were as smart/hard working/enlightened as me!' while forgetting the luck and connections and old money that got them where they are.
So you really believe that everyone can become rich if they just put in the hard work? That's such a naive view that I don't even know where to start to debate it.
This reminds of a joke about drawing an owl: you first draw 2 vertical ovals, slightly superimposed, one bigger, one smaller. Then you draw a triangle on the smaller oval. Then you draw the rest of the owl.
Sure, you can't succeed if you don't try. But you also can't succeed if you don't have anything to eat, and for the vast, vast majority of people, trying is likely to make that a real problem.
My belief is that not everyone has the same opportunities for a variety of reasons and even if something might work for me it might very well be impossible for others.
I also believe that it is our duty as society to make sure everyone can have a decent life even when not granted the same privileges others get for free.
Assuming everyone can put in the hard work and make it, you imply that everyone has or can learn "quickly" a markeatable skill, including the business acumen, the available free time and the mental/physical health required to succeed.
But the real issue is that even if everyone was able to try to get rich starting on an equally levelled field, our economic system can't allow everyone to succeed. We need poorer people to do employed jobs in order for their value produced in "excess" to be sent to shareholders and CEOs.
It just seems madness to me to have this global competition where the poor race against each other in order to be allowed to become one of the rich. We can do way better than this.
Best way to make raise employee's wages: competition between employers. For that we need more employers. For that we need more startups. For that we need more founders and entrepreneurs.
One way to encourage those people while also redistributing through taxation would be to reduce or eliminate corporate taxes but increase personal taxes, especially for the wealthy.
There would be lots of knock-on effects from this, such as more company perks to offset the large taxation of salary, but there are ways to combat that (tax benefits provided to employees as compensation). This would allow companies more capital to invest in R&D or expansion. Some of that money would go to higher wages (but if you distribute taxes more heavily to the wealthy along with this, it wouldn't affect median employee salary much).
A downside (among many, I'm sure) would be even more concentration of wealth in companies which might be used for non-free market operations, such as lobbying. It's all interconnected, so it's complex, but it also doesn't feel like we're in such a good situation socially, economically and politically that we should refrain from making large changes like that.
"Most of the low paying jobs have existed for decades in various industries (esp retail), but most of those tech jobs didn't exist 20 years ago."
How many low paying jobs are taken by e.g. a high paying e-commerce job? Hundreds surely. And if there are less low paying jobs you can pay someone less to do them because there are so many people looking for those few jobs.
Take a look at the second chart (bottom of "Page 1", the third actual page considering the title page and contents page). [0]
Revenue may be small, but profits are huge, and market capitalization (aka "wealth") is absolutely massive. And that market cap is what feeds retirement plans & pensions. So while Europe is taxing people, the US is growing profits and wealth.
The World Economic Forum had this to say about Europe's tech giants in 2017: "In total more than a third of European tech founders are based in the UK." [1] That doesn't bode well for the future, when your economy is stuck in old industries, and the leader is leaving the party.
BTW, hats off to the Finns - not sure what they are doing with gaming, but they punch well above their weight.
When it comes to creating wealth, taxation doesn't do anything but redistribute it. In order to actually generate wealth, you need capital, and people who use that capital more efficiently & effectively will become richer. It is a virtuous spiral. And what's important is that every one of those high paying tech jobs is one less low-paying job. Most of the low paying jobs have existed for decades in various industries (esp retail), but most of those tech jobs didn't exist 20 years ago. I can only imagine how many high paying tech jobs there will be in the US in 20 more years, even though I expect low-paying jobs to still outnumber them.
[0] - https://www.yardeni.com/pub/yardenifangoverview.pdf
[1] - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/10/meet-europe-top-tech-...