look at the Forbes 500 and you see lots of churn,
where is this supposed stability that will happen
with rich people cementing their gains
> Forbes 500
> churn
> people
Uh, because a list of companies is actually a list of faceless bureaucratic entities that only exist on paper, and serve as an apparatus to obfuscate the accumulation of wealth?
So the entities on the list change, but these entities are shells that a public market of callous, nameless, ever-hungry, demanding strangers loans money to, with the aim of extracting a 10% profit (or more) from their share loans, but because the names of these arbitrary, ephemeral entities change with the shifting sands of the economy, this means no one is "cementing their gains"?
If I compile a list of social clubs, ranked by gallons of beer consumed, and those social clubs report how much beer is being imbibed on the weekends nation-wide, and any individual citizen can join any club they want (no discriminatory conditions for membership) at any time they want (a different club every weekend), providing they chip in for at least the beer they drink and more (if they're feeling generous), how can that list be used to determine who accumulated the most liver damage this year?
While what you say is very true, I do think the churn on the Forbes list is actually due to the fortune of companies. Most people on the Forbes list are not diversified. If the company the person founded plummets, so does their wealth.
I happened to attend high school with the children of Dennis Bakke, who graced the Forbes list for 3 straight years. Shares in AES, the company he started, peaked at ~$68/share in the Fall of 2000. By July of 2002, AES was at $3/share. He hasn't been on the list since the plummet.
That story is fairly common among the lower ranks of the Forbes list.
Ah, that would be a very different list. Still, it's an inadequate device to craft assumptions about the wealth of wealthy people. If someone falls off the hot list, are we to assume that they suffered an MC Hammer style bankruptcy, or did they just retain a static amount of wealth, and get edged out by ever-more fabulously wealthy upstarts?
So the entities on the list change, but these entities are shells that a public market of callous, nameless, ever-hungry, demanding strangers loans money to, with the aim of extracting a 10% profit (or more) from their share loans, but because the names of these arbitrary, ephemeral entities change with the shifting sands of the economy, this means no one is "cementing their gains"?
If I compile a list of social clubs, ranked by gallons of beer consumed, and those social clubs report how much beer is being imbibed on the weekends nation-wide, and any individual citizen can join any club they want (no discriminatory conditions for membership) at any time they want (a different club every weekend), providing they chip in for at least the beer they drink and more (if they're feeling generous), how can that list be used to determine who accumulated the most liver damage this year?