A list of causes of economic inequality

Some essays point out the figures of the huge and growing economic inequalities in this world, the fact that so much of the world is owned by so few people.
For example, Ends of History and Future Histories in the Longue Duree by Benjamin Pope

(Capitalism and Liberalism: An End of History?)
As noted by Thomas Piketty in Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, the concentration of wealth at the top of present-day developed countries has once again reached the levels last attained in the Belle Époque of pre-1914 Europe. The financialization of the economy and the emerging class of ultra-rich oligarchs are leading to a situation where not only economic but democratic power is increasingly in the hands of an elite.

The problem is to understand the causes of these inequalities. Just blaming "capitalism" for these inequalities does not make any sense, because this word is just a confusion of so many different details of how things work now, including things that work properly and things that don't. The confusion of everything is a very comfortable view for simplistic minds looking for simplistic solutions of just breaking everything, as if it would help. This was carried by Marxism, with the results we know : ignoring the logical necessities of what is needed to make an economy work properly, and thus breaking everything, just results in a worse situation than the one initially complained of.
Seriously, the problem of growing inequalities requires careful analysis of its diverse causes.

The role of automation, and the nature of human intelligence

Even if human thought can sometimes be defective, and computing power can be extremely helpful for some tasks that human thought could not do, both abilities are anyway not comparable and there will always be a component of understanding and creativity in human thought that computers will never be able to replace.

• First because it will globalize the job market, letting jobs be done at distance worldwide, thus reducing the gaps of salaries across nations and potentially eliminating any need of transport to go to work.
• Second, because the automation of unqualified jobs will keep increasing the inequality of economic productivity and thus incomes between humans according to their levels of qualification and intelligence.

List of other causes

• The increased need of qualifications also makes the job market more complex and fragmented, which makes it harder for people to orient and train themselves to the needed skills. Good information systems on the job market are needed, both for directly finding jobs, and in advance for students to find out what they need to learn. In the lack of such systems, inequalities appear between the many kinds of professional qualifications.
  
• The education system makes little progress and can quickly become obsolete with respect to the qualifications needs. It creates inequalities between those who waste their life in the system and those who escape, in case they actually need to escape, i.e. they are able to create their job themselves instead of serving the system.
  
• The globalization and virtualization of the economy increases possibilities to avoid taxation, therefore increasing the inequalities between the business which "follow the rules" as they were intended to apply, and those which find ways around.
• Geographic inequalities take place between developed regions and underdeveloped ones, as international trade makes a relative worldwide uniformity of prices on goods that can be traded, but there is no such a good worldwide job market yet, thus forcing many people to work for local poor customers at low prices, while they need to import special goods of high technology from more developed countries anyway. The development of online work will help to reduce geographic inequalities in salaries
• Bureaucracy (heavy, complicated laws on employment and economic activity) is a burden that distracts many activities from, well, productivity. And it is always going to create inequalities between those who follow the rules and those who don't, making fiscal optimization between countries and/or hiding their activities in the private sphere or abroad. In many cases, the idea of fighting against fraud and tax havens inspecting activities to oblige them all to follow the rules, is just a myth. Only material operations such as trade of natural resources, and clearly visible material assets such as real estate, can be taxed without risk of avoidance. Abstract things such as transactions and jobs cannot be well regulated as long as there will be incentives on hiding them into the private sphere (such as through online jobs), and the very act of putting taxes on official activities is such an incentive.
• The lack of general efficient cures to the corruption problem, creates inequalities between the more and the less corrupt countries, and corruption itself makes unfair inequalities between people.
  
• Another cause could have been thought of :the lack of capitals on the market, due to the lack of savings both by individuals and by states (public debts) could have increased the price of capitals (real interest rates) comparatively to the price of work, in the share of income in businesses. As explained above, the only solution for the long term would be Austerity Now ! But it turned out that the opposite happened: real interest rates strongly decreased in the last decades, even approaching zero, because productive goods became cheaper and more people could afford to accumulate savings. Still a burden persists on public budgets caused by the big amount of public debts, leading to keep high taxes, themselves having perverse effects by the resulting incentive to find ways around. But too low real interest rates can become a cause of inequality too ! Here is how. Long ago, the role of the capital market was that, savings made reflect the accumulation of some real value, such as the creation of new machines, buildings or other productive goods which were useful to produce more, therefore generating long term income in proportion to the interest rate. Now this use is gone, since machines are now cheap. What happens instead is that there are anyway some systems which provide some expectation of long term regular income, but which are no more productive machines created by really productive work ; they still basically exist due to other causes: some kind of titles of ownership, such as land ownership, intellectual property or monopolistic positions. Then, these titles of ownership get a monetary value which pops up from this expectation of future income, roughly produced mathematically by taking the amount of expected regular income and dividing it by the value of the real interest rate. This results in a super DIVISION BY ZERO ERROR: dividing a strictly positive expectation of future regular income by the zero value of the real interest rate, gives an infinite capital value of these ownership titles...By the way, as a logical consequence we can notice that a low real interest rate constitutes a big incentive for creating systems that are expected to be able to capture income in the long term future. It makes some people super rich in numerical value, but it is a wealth created from nowhere and it is completely virtual. In the case this whole profit is unfair, we cannot say these amounts of wealth "were stolen" from the rest of people, so that I don't see much sense in the idea of trying to redistribute it. Instead, it is the numerically materialized anticipation of what "will be stolen" from them in the long term future. Thus instead of trying to redistribute it, we might for example question the kind of laws such as intellectual property laws which are expected to make these long term capture of income possible. But longer term expectations are a more unstable kind of stuff... which results in making (some) speculators wealthier.
• Overpopulation creates inequalities between those who own the lands and those who need to use them. Redistribution is no kind of solution. Why should natural resources, which are actually an expensive resource, be given for free to some kind of (possibly dispersed, undefined) "groups" at the expense of the rest of people, just because they make more children ? Any rule that would reward fertility, which is anyway logically equivalent (no matter if you like it or not) to any idea of free equal distribution of the value of resources between people as proportional to their number, is a wrong rule that must not be adopted. The world needs a reduction of fertility in order to save the planet. Of course the absence of redistribution, and the resulting inequality between owners and non-owners, is also quite often unfair. But the only real solution is to take the problem at its root, that is not "capitalism" but overpopulation.