information and democracy

Here's Byrne Hobart at The Diff, writing about the existence of a trillionaire: It was inevitable that this would happen. 2% real GDP growth, 3% inflation, a 5% or so equity risk premium, some dispersion among equities, and—critically—being a species with five rather than six or seven fingers on each hand meant that some time this decade or next we'd cross the threshold where a single person is, on a mark-to-market basis, worth a trillion dollars. There's been a lot of discussion about this, most of which treats the threshold as meaningful. And, to be fair, there are plenty of people making arguments that are just as relevant at $990bn or $1.1tr or whatever. On the other hand, it's suspicious that the time to make those arguments is when one person's wealth passed an arbitrary threshold that's exciting to people who don't think about things so rigorously. I'm very suspicious of politicians who want some kind of reckoning about wealth inequality that coincides with a huge drop in how…