The Rich Are Hogging Our Common Inheritance

And how we can take it back.

_The following is an excerpt from Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back

by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, published by the New Press, 2008.

Technological progress … has provided society with what economists call a “free lunch,” that is, an increase in output that is not commensurate with the increase in effort and cost necessary to bring it about. — Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990)

Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men in the nation, is worth over $60 billion. Does he “deserve” all this money? Why? Did he work so much harder than everyone else? Did he create something so extraordinary that no one else could have created? Ask Buffett himself and he will tell you that personally he thinks that “society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned.”

But if this is true, doesn’t society deserve a very significant share of what he has received?

Buffett may not know it, but he has put his finger on one of the most explosive issues developing just beneath the surface of public awareness. In recent decades researchers working in a broad range of economic, technological, and other fields have clarified much more precisely than in the past the many ways “society” contributes to the creation of “wealth” — and, accordingly, how relatively little any one individual can be said to have earned and “deserved.” Their research, in turn, raises profound moral — and ultimately political — questions that are becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. At the heart of this revolution in understanding is a fundamental reconsideration of the extraordinary role of knowledge in economic growth — and of how ever-increasing knowledge, accumulating across the generations, is central to the creation of all wealth.

SOURCE: http://www.onthecommons.org/content.php?id=2331