Dubious source, and their numbers don't add up, but I think they're generally indicating the right order of magnitude change in wealth over my 32 year lifetime...

] in the late 1970s, the top one percent held 13 percent of
] the wealth; in 1995 it held 38 percent.

] In 1960 CEOs received 40 times the average worker's
] salary. In 1992 they received 157 times.

Wealth Distribution

Interesting little piece on wealth distribution:

Specifically, the number of people with some value of wealth w is proportional to 1/wE. Pareto claimed that E is generally has a value of between 2 and 3. The bigger this value, the greater the extent to which extreme wealth is suppressed - and the more socialist the economy.

Burda's group define liberal economies as those in which E is less than 2, and social economies as those in which E is greater than 2.

Wealth spawns corruption

Kondratieff long wave explaination. "But it was fun while it lasted" conclude our PhD's at the ITU. Page 18 of 23

An interesting datapoint is the 15% reduction in fixedline subscriptions in Finland where they now have 94% mobile penetration. (page 8 of 23). Such a drop in the US would mean an anual loss of $3.5 billion in revenue for the RBOCs. No wonder they make me get a phone with my damn DSL...

ITU 2002 report

More law suits of telecoms alleging Enron-esque accounting

So Sue Me -- New flurry of suits alleging telecom stock inflation