Piketty goes over the numbers in his book Capital and Ideology in several chapters:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_and_Ideology

(His earlier Capital in the Twenty-First Century is more well-known.)

I agree with your logic here, but ideally Intel and AMD have to follow the same rules and find cause to terminate their employees OR pay out severance based on duration of service.

You might follow this up by saying that this decreases global competitiveness as well, and you’re absolutely right.

When say for example HiSilicon’s employees work 12hrs a day 6 days a week and live in bunks on company property it would certainly be hard for Intel/AMD to compete. We then start getting into issues of worker rights being baked into international trade agreements.

When do we collectively agree to stop the race to the bottom ? Or do we just accept that labour has no value and humans are expendable?

I think most of the problems with this issue are rooted in the fact that capital is becoming increasingly more profitable than labour. It reminds me of “Capital In the Twenty-first Century” by Thomas Piketty.

> The US has pretty good Social Mobility as well, it is complete myth that the "rich" in the US is stagnate, most of the Billionaires in the US are 1st Generation Billionaires, this highlights there are income and social mobility.

Most economists of inequality dispute this. As measured by the likelihood that you'll earn more than your parents [1], or that you'll move up the income or wealth distribution compared to where you were born [2], the United States lags significantly behind most other developed nations. Social mobility in the United States is also lower than it has almost ever been.

[1] Chetty et al., The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940

[2] Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Yes, it's called "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty.

Hmmm. The traditional (1960's) view (Kuznet's "Inverted U") is that starting from low-tech societies where everyone has more or less the same, inequality rises with the advent of technology, then falls again as democracy and the welfare state kick in.

Thomas Piketty in his magnum opus Capital in the Twenty-First Century argues that the rise in inequality is inevitable (his famous r > g) and only interrupted by wars, depression, hyper inflation, and similar catastrophes that destroy a lot of wealth. That's rather more exciting than stagnation.

Branko Milanović’s more recent (2016) Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (which originated the famous elephant graph [2]) notes that 1) inequality has risen recently within nations, but decreased among nations; 2) the Kuznet inverted-U needs to be replaced by Kuznet waves; 3) there does not seem to be an efficiency-equity trade-off in the long-term 4) social mobility seems to be falling (such that accidents of birth basically determine your station in life again, as in previous centuries).

> periods of great inequality are correlated with significant economic growth (usually related to advances in automation, which tend not to be universally distributed) whereas periods of equality can generally be attributed to stagnation.

Here, Milanović distinguishes "malign" equalisers, which reduce both inequality and average income (namely the ones noted by Piketty: wars, epidemics, depression, etc.), and "benign" ones: widespread education, greater social transfers, and progressive taxation. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_Curve

[3] https://economics.hse.ru/data/2015/12/23/1132608306/TOC_may....

There are a number of arguments, most are too extensive to fit concisely in an HN comment. Pointers to some might be useful.

At the extreme you have the "utility monster" or "freedom monster" problem. Existential Comics explores both graphically and entertainingly:

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/8

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/259

Much of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations actually addresses the issues of inequality and the dynamic between wealth and power: "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." That's one of the shortest and most direct sentences in a book given to long and complex writing.

The Spirit Level is a book-length exploration of the problems of inequality and highly-unequal societies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book)

https://www.worldcat.org/title/spirit-level-why-equality-is-...

Thomas Picketty's works (Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Capital and Ideology) fit into this discussion.

Oxfam have a set of suggestions as well, notably Branko Milanovic's The Haves and the Have-Nots:

https://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/three-must-read-b...

I like reading PG's essays, but...I read a book on pretty much the same phenomenon ("Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty) a few months ago. It took a lot longer to cover the same ground, but it also covered it a lot better, and a lot more persuasively. Not unsurprisingly, it is also a lot less sanguine about the impact of recent wealth trends.

from the top of the paper:

"As the total value of the global financial market has vastly outgrown the value of the real economy,
financial institutions on this planet have created a web of interactions whose size and topology calls for a quantitative analysis by means of Complex Networks."

refer to Capital in the Twenty-First Century :

"The book's central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability."

regarding models, in a conclusion of Nature paper:

"Differently from other networks, here nodes have some ability to anticipate the future, including the future structure of the network and try to take advantage of it. Although in reality such ability is much more limited than what models in mainstream economics postulate, it represents a circularity in the model that is difficult to treat with analytical or statistical tools. "

so, participants use models and apply them to change behavior, making the system harder to model (!)