Taleb is not talking about what one might care about, but pointing out some mathematical facts about fat-tailed distributions (distributions with a power-law tail) and quantiles.
The practical import of those mathematical facts lies ultimately in their relevance to features of the concrete world. If they do not bear on features of the concrete world which you or I care about, then they may have intrinsic beauty as mathematical results, but it would be mere misleading mathsturbation to present them as practically significant, as T&D do.
In that situation, what is the "real" fraction of wealth of the top 1%? The value for any individual country, or the value for the aggregate?
Whichever "is relevant to whatever the context is". If the actual region of interest were the aggregate, the relevant value would be that for the aggregate.
If your objection to the richness of the rich is a claim that it is causally responsible for the poorness of the poor, then you are interested in underlying mechanisms described by the distribution.
The mechanisms entail a particular distribution, or family of distributions, and in this case the mechanisms are underspecified given the distribution. (Hence my pointing out that the phrase "the rich are being increasingly favoured" "is quite consistent with the underlying power law being constant over time".)
If your objection to the richness of the rich is a claim that it is causally responsible for the poorness of the poor, then you are interested in underlying mechanisms described by the distribution.
The mechanisms entail a particular distribution, or family of distributions, and in this case the mechanisms are underspecified given the distribution. (Hence my pointing out that the phrase "the rich are being increasingly favoured" "is quite consistent with the underlying power law being constant over time".)
"Increasingly favoure...
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists. No one one Less Wrong is quite sure why politics is a taboo topic or how things got to be that way. What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people. So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal. Since there aren't useful objective metrics of how a political discussion went, we'd have to use subjective judgements by neutral third-party raters, kind of like they do in gymnastics. (In the comment thread for this post, feel free to find fights that you have no dog in, improvise a rationality rubric, and grade participants according to your rubric... let's see how it goes.)
Be a sheep. This is probably the exact opposite of what you were taught in your high school civics class. But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively. It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy. Imagine a directed graph where each node represents a person and an edge is directed from person A to person B if person A is auto-copying person B's votes. There's a government computer system where you can change the person you're auto-copying votes from at any time or override an auto-copied vote with your own personal guess about what's best for society. Other than that, it's direct democracy... all bills are put before all citizens to vote on. Problems this might solve: