Morgan Housel

Those were, in percentage terms, great years for you for getting wages.

It's tapered off.

So the answer to your question is the rich are getting richer.

The poor, I think, are treading water, by and large.

There's always people who are doing differently than that.

But when one group of society is getting richer, treading water feels like you're falling.

And the specifics of how people spend their money.

So even if on average adjusted for inflation, their wages are flat.

But if your rent skyrocketed or you're trying to send your kids through college or you have a long commute and you got to put gas in your tank, the individual level things can feel very, very different from what the statistics show.

I think...

As an amateur student of history, across cultures, all over the place, all through history, what you want to avoid more than anything in society is when probably a third of the population wakes up every morning and says, this isn't working.

That's the point at which it's going to collapse from there is when enough people wake up in the morning and just have this feeling of like, whatever this is, it's not working out for me.

You want to avoid that part.

And so like, look, I tend to be a free markets guy.

I'm a capitalist.

I think people should be able to become very wealthy, et cetera, et cetera.

You also don't want to get to a point where people become so wealthy that a big chunk of society just wakes up every morning and says, fuck this.

This is not going to work out for me.

And I think we're either there or precariously close to there in a lot of areas in the world.

Social media, that's always been the case.