I think a large amount of our monetary inequality is down to the way we've allowed our markets to become warped.
The numerous examples of CEOs who kill their company but still make out like a bandit. The traders who're supposedly part of price discovery mechanisms but who actually just seem to keep blowing bubbles. The musicians who're granted a government monopoly to sell something we already have too much of (pop music). These are alot of the top 10% and mostly they're doing so well because our capitalist systems are broken.
Even when you get to what you might think of as 'real' work. Advertising is generally not informative but emotive - thus these jobs mostly exist to distort markets. Lobbyists are in the same line of work but using government edict to achieve the same distortions.
Yes the EMH demonstrates that markets are efficient at distributing resources, but it assumes products are fungible, actors are rational and have perfect information.
Vast swaths of our economy are about stopping products being fungible (branding, copyright, patents, lobbying) and limiting how rational actors are (marketing, branding).
I agree. My position is not that capitalism is infallible, far from it, and the distortions of incentives you mention can and should be addressed. But you will find even worse excesses in nations organized around communism.
The numerous examples of CEOs who kill their company but still make out like a bandit. The traders who're supposedly part of price discovery mechanisms but who actually just seem to keep blowing bubbles. The musicians who're granted a government monopoly to sell something we already have too much of (pop music). These are alot of the top 10% and mostly they're doing so well because our capitalist systems are broken.
Even when you get to what you might think of as 'real' work. Advertising is generally not informative but emotive - thus these jobs mostly exist to distort markets. Lobbyists are in the same line of work but using government edict to achieve the same distortions.
Yes the EMH demonstrates that markets are efficient at distributing resources, but it assumes products are fungible, actors are rational and have perfect information.
Vast swaths of our economy are about stopping products being fungible (branding, copyright, patents, lobbying) and limiting how rational actors are (marketing, branding).