Usury, which is to say lending at interest, will inevitably in aggregate lead to a tiny minority owning virtually everything. This is obvious to anyone who has basic high school math and understands that interest compounds geometrically and wages grow linearly at best.
Labor share of GDP went from 64% in 1950 to 58% today. That means wages grew slightly slower than GDP per capita, that’s certainly not enough to mean wages grew sub-exponentially.
For wages to grow linearly, labor share of GDP would have to fall exponentially towards zero.
not really. the key mistake here is treating gdp is a proxy for wages when there is no direct connection between the two. in a pathological case, you could have a $1T GDP and have zero wages paid. the question of whether mean or median figures are more appropriate when talking about wages (what I assume you are alluding to with your statistics quip) is a side issue. no amount of statistics knowledge will help someone who insists on comparing apples to oranges.
I have strong doubts given the amount of churn among both the ultra rich and our biggest companies. No one seems to stay in the top 10 for more than a few decades.
Lending at interest only leads to unlimited aggregation if the risk of lending is zero. Zero interest rate policy and government backed securities is indeed as close to zero risk as possible in the real world.
it may be true, but it's not obvious without making some unstated assumptions. inflation-adjusted returns on loans are not necessarily positive (though they usually are). interest compounds geometrically by definition, but subexponential wage growth is an observation that may depend on how you calculate inflation.
I've read some non-mainstream theories that economies based on cash accounts and equity-only investments are possible. Some would argue that equity-only investment arrangements are better for society, as they align interests between capital and production in a way that recourse interest lending cannot.
You can already see some fintech startups attempting equity-based home "loans", in which the "lender"'s lien is on a percentage of the future sale value of the home, not a fixed dollar amount. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
I'm not sure how financing on consumer debt like credit cards and non-commercial vehicles would work, though. Perhaps discouraging consumer profligacy would be a feature, however, not necessarily a bug.
In real reality, Danish banks are charging 0% interest for mortgages and making their money off of closing fees[1]. Also the natural rate of interest is zero[2].
Just because you've been raised from birth to believe usury is necessary for the payment system (not the economy!) to function doesn't make it so.
