US economist, Noah Smith, has penned a good article at Bloomberg arguing that the rise in inequality across the developed world has not been caused by greedy corporates, but by hyper-inflation in land values, which has enriched land owners at the expense of everyone else:
There is growing concern that wealth inequality has skyrocketed, and that capital income accounts for a growing share of the economic pie. This was the theme of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”… [But] we forget that land also is a form of capital, which means landlords (and homeowners) are capitalists, too… it is land, not corporate capital, that has been responsible for the lion’s share of the increase in capital’s share of income.
