Ada PalmerJun 24, 2024
Sometimes people ask me (as a historian of the period) about the super rich in Renaissance Florence, whether the art/culture/science boom was an example of trickle-down working. (A) Florence had a wealth tax, (B) its richest man Palla Strozzi had the equivalent of only $250 million. Want more Leonardos? Tax the Rich. 🎨🧑‍🎨🖌🎭🔭🖼📚📐🏛🎻💰
Show threadkechpaja

@adapalmer So... I'm all for taxing the rich to fund social programs, and for making those taxes progressive enough that the bulk of the tax burden falls on those most able to pay. I'm being a nerd here, rather than trying to make any political point.

That said, my understanding of probability is making my brain twitch at comparing the total adjusted wealth of the richest citizen of a city with a 5 (or low 6?) figure population against that of either the entire modern world (8 billion) or the entire modern United States (1/3 of a billion). Wouldn't you expect both the number of very rich people _and the highest level of wealth attained by an individual_ to correlate with the size of the society that they live in and draw their wealth from?

(Has anyone ever done an actual rigorous statistical analysis like this of different societies, both modern and historical?)

Jul 18, 2024 at 4:58pmWeb
Show threadAlonJul 18, 2024
@kechpaja @adapalmer Branko Milanovic has inequality figures for Early Modern Europe. Inequality had to be lower then, because average incomes were so low that there wasn't enough surplus to extract. For this he came up with the extraction ratio: actual inequality divided by the maximum possible inequality if everyone but a narrow elite is at subsistence. These societies' ratio was near 1, and inequality rose during early industrialization, before falling thanks to modern social democracy.