I would love to know a bit more about mechanism. Is it through family holdings, individual wealth management, sons of well-to-dos becoming proverbial doctors and lawyers.
Florence is especially interesting. 15th century Italy had a relatively modern (similar/ancestral to our own) economic-political system. Wealth wasn't all about land-and-title aristocracy. "Merchant" families were the rich powerful instead.
Generally speaking, I'm curious about how all thia works on the individual level. Thomas Picketty's ideas about how wealth dynamics work in the long term are convincing, but, on simple interpretation, it isn't obvious how Bill Gates fits into the picture (other than as an outlier).
Florence is especially interesting. 15th century Italy had a relatively modern (similar/ancestral to our own) economic-political system. Wealth wasn't all about land-and-title aristocracy. "Merchant" families were the rich powerful instead.
Generally speaking, I'm curious about how all thia works on the individual level. Thomas Picketty's ideas about how wealth dynamics work in the long term are convincing, but, on simple interpretation, it isn't obvious how Bill Gates fits into the picture (other than as an outlier).