The current form of the system we practice is massively different from the one that put us so far ahead. We tried many things trying to push it to be more successful. This gap change is a result of some of that. We now need to evaluate whether that change was actually better. This gap may be short term worth it but with trends like quiet quitting, we probably should think about whether these changes will slowly cause larger long term losses in productivity at the lower ends of these hierarchies.
'We' haven’t seen an economy like this since the Gilded Age. The 'this' you talk about is new territory for post-WW2 America, and the people at the bottom are pretty pissed about it. Not sure how long/how much force it will take to continue with it's making your life 'much better'.
The society whose foundations 'this' is built upon, the one that built the middle class, was built on very different rules. Marginal tax rates over 90%, strong(er) labor protections, and CEO-to-worker pay ratios today's CEOs would balk at.
'Income inequality' is really just a pyramid scheme with branding pretending it's still an extension of post-WW2 America that built the middle class. The American public isn't buying it anymore.
More than one third of Americans do not own any stock at all, even indirectly through mutual funds or retirement accounts[1]. Although admittedly, this number has been falling steadily (in 1989, more than two thirds of Americans did not own stocks).
The bigger these pay gaps get, the more expensive for the average person those shares get. We are not all shareholders in any meaningful sense, and over time less and less of us will be. This works better than other things we've tried, but we've only tried about three things. There's plenty of ideas that we should look into.
You...you know you don't have to buy whole shares, right? VOO has a minimum investment of $1.00. While I won't argue that not a single person in the country is incapable of investing $1.00, the % of the population that couldn't stick a few bucks every now and again in a free account is probably single digit.
