Millionaire gives away fortune which made him miserable
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
One of the most dangerous fallacies in the world. Wealth does not create poverty.
Poverty is the natural state of humanity - we evolved from being apes and crawled out of jungles, caves, and forests, and have been fighting nonstop to improve our lot. The question shouldn't be, "How come some people are poor?" but instead, "How come some people aren't?" Poverty is the natural state of affairs.
This is never more obvious than when I'm somewhere with mixed levels of wealth. I'm in Northern Thailand right now. The poor in Thailand come from little villages where people barely subside on rice farming. No one "made" them poor, they've been poor for basically forever. Sometimes the poor farmers leave and go to the city to try to make money and make a better life. So they work in rather unpleasant jobs (construction, cleaning, cooking, etc) for far more money than they would've made subsistence farming. No one's making them poor - the jobs, unpleasant though they are, are far more pleasant for them than where they came from.
Wealth comes from people who coordinate, manage, invent, develop, streamline. People are willing to pay for these things, so the producers become wealthy. In turn, the wealthy people can purchase things from the poor people - which makes the poor more wealthy too.
More can be done. But the idea that making things people want and improving the world and getting compensated for it is creating poverty is false.
The sad irony is that microcredit/microfinance works best when it's not a charity - further there are numerous examples of microcredits that do operate as charities and who end up squandering money on inefficient operations than reaching the poor because of how their performance is measured.
As you point out, the idea that wealth comes from taking from the poor is not only wrong, but often harmful to the very people those like this donor claims he wants to help.
Virtually every productive activity has negative externalities, and to deny those is as naive as thinking of wealth as zero sum. It's not zero-sum, but it's not monotonically positive either.
This is why East Germany was by far a worse polluter than West Germany, similarly for North and South Korea, etc. Thinking that virtually every productive activity has negative externalities may be true but should also take into account the much greater positive externalities.
Someone is becoming very wealthy pulling oil out of the Niger delta, but the people living there are becoming much poorer as a result. http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/5524695-146/niger...
Wealthy countries become wealthy not by harvesting natural resources but by harnessing entrepreneurs and generating ideas. It's why capital overwhelmingly gets invested in developed countries and not developing ones - ie the returns are simply better.
(The argument you do see more often is that the wealthy often apply their (proportionately larger) power at the expense of the poor. But that is far too complicated, even if you disagree with it, do dismiss so tritely, and not at all what you are refuting here.)
(( Side thought: It's interesting to wonder if 'poverty' as such even existed prior to the first agricultural revolution. ))
Look at science-fiction movies. Why is the robots turning on their creators and killing us such a common theme?
Perhaps some catholic western philosophy of guilt, sin, and deserved punishment is at work.
Uh. You can only be poor if there's a monetary system in place however simplistic. Poverty and wealth are two sides of the same coin literally.
EDIT: The flawed logic of viewpoint is even clearer when you consider "Are apes poor?". What could that possibly even mean?
One of the most dangerous fallacies in the world.
It may be a fallacy but, it's certainly not dangerous. At most it's a slight counterbalance to the ongoing concentration of wealth and power that's happening globally.
I used to always want the fastest computer with the largest monitor and the most comfortable chair. But I found that none of that helped me write better code. In fact, it hindered it because I was too concentrated on my tools and forgot that what mattered (code) came from my head.
Now there is an idea. Anyone wants to shake real estate?