{"id":13300,"date":"2025-03-18T01:51:45","date_gmt":"2025-03-18T05:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13300"},"modified":"2025-03-18T01:51:45","modified_gmt":"2025-03-18T05:51:45","slug":"inequality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=13300","title":{"rendered":"Inequality"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day, Elon Musk’s Grok kindly drew a plot for me. After it estimated (understandably crudely, since the data are inconsistent\/unreliable) the percentage of global wealth owned by the top 1%, I asked it to create an diagram for inclusion in Web pages. Well, here it is, though converted to a PNG for easier sharing:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What is the significance, you might wonder? Simple. Look at the beginning, the early 20th century. Rising inequality, resulting in well-known upheavals: a world war, revolutions everywhere, the rise of totalitarianism, another world war.<\/p>\n

But then, inequality plummeted. Not only that, it stayed low for decades. Precisely the decades of Pax Americana<\/em>, the peaceful world of the Cold War, a world with two superpowers, yet a world that was mostly defined by the rules-based, liberal democratic world order imposed by the United States of America.<\/p>\n

It all began to unravel in the late 1990s. Since then, inequality has been rising at a rate probably faster than the rate that characterized America’s Gilded Age<\/em> in the late 19th century.<\/p>\n

We know what happened the last time the world went down that road.<\/p>\n<\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day, Elon Musk’s Grok kindly drew a plot for me. After it estimated (understandably crudely, since the data are inconsistent\/unreliable) the percentage of global wealth owned by the top 1%, I asked it to create an diagram for inclusion in Web pages. Well, here it is, though converted to a PNG for easier […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,25,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-history","category-politics","category-19-id","category-25-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13300"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13302,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13300\/revisions\/13302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}