At transferring wealth from hard working well-intentioned individuals (and those who must compete with them) to hustlers, yes.
You repeated your narrow point about the group of college educated individuals growing, but as far as I can tell that doesn't actually address skohan's much broader claims about healthcare, housing, and education. Can you address those as well? "Look over there!" isn't an argument.
Wealth is just a measure of "popularity * productivity". Besos is more wealthy than a nurse because amazon engages in billions of transactions which are each productive. A nurse engages in one.
Your wealth, at a first approximation, is the rate at which you are productively transacting.
> Besos is more wealthy than a nurse because amazon engages in billions of transactions which are each productive.
Bezos is wealthy because he is a parasitic rentier capitalist. He's one of the major beneficiaries of the imperialist American intellectual property regime. That's it. That's the special sauce.
"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.
Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime."
Besos got wealthy because he built a successful business which provides a ton of value to customers. Besos is the wealthiest person on earth because the benefits from a financial system designed to grow the wealth of already wealthy people exponentially.
You can make the argument that bezos and other "self made" entrepreneurs deserve their astronomical wealth, but many people in the top wealth tiers just had the privilege of being born wealthy, and of living in a system their class has the power to bias in their favour.
At transferring wealth from hard working well-intentioned individuals (and those who must compete with them) to hustlers, yes.
You repeated your narrow point about the group of college educated individuals growing, but as far as I can tell that doesn't actually address skohan's much broader claims about healthcare, housing, and education. Can you address those as well? "Look over there!" isn't an argument.