Coal is mostly used to produce electricity and steel. So more electricity from solar then coal is actually good news.
However oil and gas are much harder to replace, but again we actually have a lot of the technology, it is “just” about rolling it out on scale, which is hard.
The period after WW2 was one of two periods in Western Europe, were wealth inequality went down in the last thousand years or so. The other one was the Black Death, when a lot of people died and that lead to worker shortages. Honestly a lot of deaths in WW2 might have also been a big part of why the post war period was so pleasant.
Makes you think about the low fertility rate in a different way.
and profits are also income with some steps in between and there are taxes on profits…
So I just simplify and file those under taxes.
Lets say a worker produces a 100 in value. 50 of that go to wages, 25 to profit and 25 to taxes. If you raise the wage to 80, then it is impossible to give 25 to profit and 25 to taxes, as only a 100 in value is produced. As in 100 - 80 = 20 and 25 + 25 = 50 and 50 > 20. So you need to lower profit and taxes so that taxes + profit = 20. If the wage raise is lower, you can get away with just cutting profits, but in this case it has to be taxes as well.
I was just trying to point out, that the definition of not working is problematic. It includes pensioners and it excludes a lot of people, who I would call rich, like say Fortune 500 CEOs. It therefore needs to be enough capital to allow a passive income well above global average. A good number would imho be something like USD 1,000,000 to be a proper capitalist. And yes a lot of US Americans are rich.
US American pensioners lowest possible social security payment is higher then the median Chinese wage. Cry me a river.
The production of the workers labour is basically split three ways: Wage, company profit and taxes. If the workers productivity does not change, an increasing the wage is therefore going to reduce profit and/or taxes.
In a public pension, there is some sort of tax, which is taken from workers to pay the pensions. If you want to increase pensions, you need to increase those taxes, hence everything else being equal you lower the real wage of workers.
Why give more to the workers, when you can take it yourself?
And, if you assume retirees fund their retirements through investments (which is not generally true btw, private pensions are not the only model), this holds on some level for retirees as well. If their income depends on the profits of some company, then it is not to their benefit if that company needs to pay workers more.
When you have a public pension, the difference is just that you do not take it via profit, but via some sort of tax. So for pensioners in general, they do not want to increase the real pay of workers. It is also hard to argue that a government pension is not a form of wealth, when something similar on the private market is considered that.
The simplest way to classify “rich” is capitalist class. Those that no longer perform labor. Instead, their wealth passively generates wealth that sustains their lifestyle.
That means everybody who managed to retire is rich.
The big advantage is that the 180th meridian ends up in a very unpopulated part of the world. It is Chukotka Oblast and more importantly Fiji. For the current 0meridian style maps, that is two edges being without much population and not cutting too many continents.