Technology and Inequality
How technology is widening economic inequality between and within countries, and whether policy can reverse the trend.
Technology and Wealth Concentration
Technology has been the primary driver of wealth concentration in the 21st century. The world's ten richest people are all tech founders or investors. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, and Jensen Huang collectively hold over $1 trillion in wealth -- more than the GDP of all but 15 countries.
The concentration reflects technology's economics. Digital products have near-zero marginal costs: serving an additional Google user costs almost nothing. Network effects create winner-take-all markets. Intellectual property protections extend monopoly power. The result is that technology companies generate enormous revenues with relatively few employees -- Google has 180,000 employees to serve 4.3 billion users. The ratio of value created to workers employed is unprecedented, and the surplus flows to founders, investors, and senior employees.
