The proprietor of this blog, author of this post, Martin Hutchinson, knows some stuff.
From The Bear's Lair hosted at his True Blue Will Never Stain website, April 24:
The Bear’s Lair: How to Produce Trillionaires
Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO of Louis Vuitton is currently the world’s richest man, worth around $239 billion; he is notable in coming neither from the United States nor from the tech sector. His wealth is a product of globalization, which has produced demand for Western fashion brands among a substantial fraction of 8 billion people. Globalization is just one of the forces artificially inflating the wealth of the richest at the expense of the rest of us; I will herein examine the history of extreme wealth and the factors inflating it and forecast the conditions that will produce the world’s first trillionaires.
Contrary to leftist popular myth, the Industrial Revolution did not produce extremes of wealth. Thomas Newcomen, its instigator by inventing the steam engine in 1712, remained a provincial ironmonger throughout his life. Josiah Wedgwood, the potter and inventor of modern marketing, achieved worldwide sales but a net worth at his death of only around £500,000 – around $220 million with an m in today’s money if you convert by the gold value, my preferred way of making that conversion. Sir Richard Arkwright, the first successful textile entrepreneur, got a knighthood for his pains, but his net worth at death in 1792 was around £600,000. Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Gower, was a landed magnate who expanded his wealth substantially through successful industrial investment but was still worth only £2 million at his death in 1803 – not quite qualifying as a dollar billionaire in today’s money.
Half a century later, the following generation were richer, but only moderately so. Richard Arkwright, son of Sir Richard, was the richest commoner in Britain when he died in 1843 worth £3.5 million ($1.5 billion in today’s money) – probably only Gower’s grandson the 2nd Duke of Sutherland was richer, through inheritance and removing the inhabitants from the Highlands of Scotland. In the United States, John Jacob Astor, the country’s richest man, died in 1848 worth $20 million – about £4.1 million 1848 pounds or $1.9 billion 2023 dollars.
Then, without significant inflation – if anything, prices declined between 1840 and 1880 – the size of fortunes in the United States but not in Britain or elsewhere took a leap upwards. Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877 worth $100 million; his son William Howard Vanderbilt died in 1885, only eight years later, worth $200 million. ($9.5 billion and $19 billion in 2023 values). Then around 1900 the first dollar billionaire appeared: John D. Rockefeller, with Henry Ford following around 1914 (both worth around $95 billion in today’s dollars).
No fortunes of that size appeared outside the United States, showing that the increase in scale of the top U.S. fortunes had either policy or economic causes peculiar to that country....
....MUCH MORE
