Now I’m sure that, among that top 1%, there were some incredibly hard-working geniuses. Maybe some produced productivity gains that were actually worth 200 times more than what the average member of the bottom 99% contributed.* But power drives economic outcomes at least as often as productivity. Being able to slash all your workers’ pay (or work them to exhaustion in an 110-degree warehouse) simply because there is high unemployment is not exactly a valuable skill. Any fool could improve the bottom line at “a highly profitable company” by “demanding large-scale concessions” from its employees.