$350 million (the amount referenced in the article) in 1986 dollars is $760 million in 2015 dollars. [0]
Still quite a bit less than $5 billion.
[0] http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=350.00&year1=19...
Still quite a bit less than $5 billion.
[0] http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=350.00&year1=19...
[0] https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MEHOINUSA672N
It's not like all that Microsoft stock would be evenly distributed among the middle class if he had never come along.
Show me how much of the pie Bill Gates has kept from the total value Microsoft has created over nearly 40 years, including for public investors, the software industry, hardware industry, all global productivity gains related to Microsoft software, Microsoft employees, and so on (including all salaries paid out over 40 years by Microsoft).
Now let's do the same math for Elon Musk, Larry Page, Steve Jobs / Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and so on.
Don't forget to quantify the benefits to consumers, including quality of life gains. What's Google's search engine worth to consumers? How much time does it save them? What kind of quality of life boost - even if small in per capita terms - has it provided to over a billion people?
As automation kicks in, we will see more value created by fewer and fewer people, leaving everyone else behind. So even if the middle class doesn't go technically backwards, they still have to compete with Microsoft and Google millionaires for assets like housing. We are seeing that already in markets with lots of high tech employees.
Do I make fantastic food for a very limited amount of people or do I cook for a lot of people? Turns out, that yacht chefs make a lot more money and it's a fun job where the hardest part is having to catch dinner first.
I didn't make the rules and I'm just living in the system. I really enjoy both, it doesn't make much difference to me if I cook for a few or a lot, but whether I do depends on wealth distribution. Most crew on yachts are very talented so an engineer would instead of being engineer for a limited amount of people would be an engineer in a power plant or as one engineer I worked with if he want back to his former engineering job, as a rocket scientist. The captain instead of managing an handful or crew would be managing scores or hundreds of people in upper management somewhere.
There is so much wasted energy and talent serving the wealthiest of the wealthiest. A lot of these people are still miserable with all their wealth because there is always a person with a bigger boat. At the end of the day, Paul Allen is making the wealthiest people on earth miserable.
$350 mil in 1986 is probably a good x5-x10 in today's money if not more. You also need to take money supply into consideration.
Well, for things that people in that range it doesn't, because the way the vastly wealthy have gotten wealthier faster than the median and lower means that the amount of money chasing the thing that segment spends money on has expanded much faster than is the case for the rest of society.
> You also need to take money supply into consideration.
Price inflation indexes already take money supply into consideration, since increases in the supply of money decrease the relative value of money vs. the goods and services it is chasing. So, no, you don't have to take it into account in addition to price inflation. Its simply one of the significant inputs in determining price inflation.