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Two Big Reasons Wealth Distribution Won’t Work How You Think

Kevin McElroy
6 min readJun 19, 2019

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Welcome to money island! You’re rich! And dead.

Your big plans for cutting up all the money equitably won’t work to increase prosperity. Here’s why:

  1. Money is not wealth.
  2. Wealthy people don’t tend to own lots of money proportional to their net worth.

First, money is not wealth. Let that roll around on your mind’s tongue for a bit. I know this idea seems foreign or even ridiculous. For many people, wealth and money are the same thing. Wealthy people have money. Have lots of money and you’re wealthy.

Not exactly. And I’ll prove it.

There’s a bad narrative out there that we can simply split up the number of dollars in existence or maybe even print more into existence in order to equitably distribute them.

The problem is that wealth does not come from currency units. Quite the opposite.

The wealth of a society is not dictated by how many currency units the central bank has printed or digitally asserted into existence.

If that were the case, then a country like Zimbabwe could simply print their way to prosperity. And they actually tried! It didn’t work. That’s because money is not wealth — and the more you confuse it with wealth by trying to increase the number of units in circulation, the less wealth there is to go…

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