What does Google founder Larry Page have that you don’t have?
AEIdeas
That is the question asked by Andy Kessler in today’s WSJ:
Yes, some people have more than others. Yet as far as millionaires and billionaires are concerned, they’re experiencing a horrifying revolution: consumption equality. For the most part, the wealthy bust their tail, work 60-80 hour weeks building some game-changing product for the mass market, but at the end of the day they can’t enjoy much that the middle class doesn’t also enjoy. Where’s the fairness? What does Google founder Larry Page have that you don’t have?
Kessler points out, for instance, that a $700 flat screen TV beats an $80,000 NFL sky box. And while you may not have a private jet, you can fly almost anywhere in the world for under $1000.
Spot the pattern here? Just about every product or service that makes our lives better requires a mass market or it’s not economic to bother offering. Those who invent and produce for the mass market get rich. And the more these innovators better the rest of our lives, the richer they get but the less they can differentiate themselves from the masses whose wants they serve. It’s the Pages and Bransons and Zuckerbergs who have made the unequal equal: So, sure, income equality may widen, but consumption equality will become more the norm.
Actually, Milton Friedman used to make a similar point about how it’s the 99 percent who really benefit from the advance of free-market capitalism and technological progress. As he wrote in “Capitalism and Freedom”:
Mr. Page earned his money, so I have no quarrel whatever with him, but the premise of the post is absurd.
The rich have immensely higher quality of material life – which translate at least partly to superior happiness – as a result of their greater wealth. The best medical care, supremely comfortable homes, considerably less hassle in travel (and go anywhere they want), zero product tradeoff (an iPad and a Kindle, if they wish, just to cite a trivial example), every minute of the day spent as they choose rather than as someone else orders them to do, etc., etc.
And all this without any worry whatever that they’ll come up short at the end of the month or the next 50 years (provided they exercise even minimal prudence).
There’s no question that the non-wealthy are vastly better off materially than they were 100 years ago (or even 50 years ago); that doesn’t alter the fact that the wealthy feel only the stress they choose to feel rather than the stress that comes with riskier material circumstances.