notes.husk.org/likes images.

jakke:

Piketty and Zucman have a new working paper out and it’s a really interesting and important read.

TL;DR is that more and more of the total economic output in rich countries is being accumulated as wealth in a way that hasn’t happened in over a hundred years. This is probably due to slowing productivity and population growth, rather than everyone waking up and deciding they want to save more money. Obviously has massive implications in terms of investment taxation and regulation in the long run.

But holy eff I cannot get over this graph that shows the distribution of US wealth over time. In the early part of that graph, human slaves are one of the single largest sources of wealth. Like, the proportion of total wealth from the ownership of slaves was higher than the proportional of total wealth from the ownership of housing during the housing bubble. And things worked this way for decades.

So by and large, this is how American wealth was initially accumulated - by kidnapping and imprisoning Africans and forcing them to work and claiming ownership of the output of the labour. Not even an exaggeration there. It’s just really jarring to actually see data on it.

Yes: “So by and large, this is how American wealth was initially accumulated - by kidnapping and imprisoning Africans and forcing them to work [on land violently expropriated from Native Americans] and claiming ownership of the output of the labour.”