EconAir

In an earlier post, Them That Has, Gets: The Rich Get a Lot Richer , I mentioned that the 5% of the households with the highest income accounted for about 35% of total consumption in the United States.  This percent will probably rise in the future if the long-term trend towards more income inequality continues to grow. Two related comments. The relatively affluent probably account for an even higher percent of discretionary spending.  Other studies indicate that rising income inequality is a global trend, occurring in most wealthy countries.  Also, there is a rapidly growing elite of super rich in the rest of the world, as the Forbes list of the wealthiest families in the world indicates. This raises a number of questions.  Given the level of imports of mass produced products, is mass production still the basis of an industrialized economy?  And what about marketing?  Is it more profitable to go after the mass market or, invoking Pareto’s La...