A question from Yahoo! Answers:

What wd be ALL THE MAJOR EFFECTS [econ, polit, socl] if fortunes were worldwide limited to US$10 million …??

& the excess distributed worldwide, with every adult getting equal shares/year of work done? [for simplicity, workyears = years of life minus 15 years]

The most important effect would be a worldwide decrease in investment and capital formation (see Kotlikoff, Laurence J. and Lawrence Summers, “The Role of Intergenerational Transfers in Aggregate Capital Formation,” Journal of Political Economy, 89: 706-732, 1981).

The decrease in capital formation, in turn, is likely to lead to corresponding drops in wages and/or employment, especially among skilled workers, whose skills only have value if they are paired with requisite amounts of capital.