Ask HN: What can we do to stop the rich from getting richer?
The elephant in the room is to focus on what motivates people to work, once they have enough wealth to address their existential needs. When we look closely, we notice that people desire wealth for social&#x2F;psychological signalling. This explains phenomena like:
* why one billion people volunteer their time to generate over a trillion USD&#x2F;year in value, while not caring for an economic reward,
* why many extremely wealthy people live frugal lives (Buffett, Ingvar Kamprad,...),
* why many wealthy people give away (most of) &quot;their&quot; fortune (Carnegy, Gates,...),<p>Another fact to note is, that economic inequality is a relatively recent phenomenon. The hunter-gatherer system - where people shared equally all economic &quot;product&quot;, but exceptional contributors were rewarded with regard (social signal) - lasted for tens of thousands of years.<p>These observations suggest how a system can be built bottom-up, that can topple capitalism. It will look like the HG system, but will be held together by apps running on personal computing devices to simulate the economic transparency necessary for the system to work. Crypto currencies are a caricature of such a system (the important parts are in place, but the proportions are way off).