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Comment by feelix | Hacker News Reader

Since it's impossible to fully track the wealth of the worlds wealthiest people, I'm just going to go ahead and speculate.

0.0001% of 6 billion = 6000 people.

I would say that 6000 people easily control anywhere between 20% and 50% of the worlds wealth. Especially considering that if you research "How many billionaires are there?" You come up with something like this:

"A total of 1,645 people made the 2014 billionaire list, representing combined wealth of $6.4 trillion."

So taking the top 1000 billionaires, or perhaps even the top 100 or so, and then you have the families who really have enough money to control things. These would be the people that are impossible to get much information on, but who definitely hold a lot of sway over the planet.

I think these families are the ones we should be concerned with. Either them or once again a small proportion of them, numbering anywhere between 5 families and 100 families.

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> I would say that 6000 people easily control anywhere between 20% and 50% of the worlds wealth.

The 62 richest people in the world own as much as the poorest 3.6billion. In 2010 it was 388.

The 1% owns more than the rest of the world.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2016-01-18/...

Look closer at that data. Both the 62 richest people in the world and the 3.6bn poorest own a tiny tiny fraction of the world's wealth.

All you're really doing here is observing that the 3.6bn poorest people are really poor.

This does not support your statement that "the 1%" owns more than the rest of the world.

However, that statement happens to be true. If you look at the Credit Suisse wealth report that those oxfam figures are cherry picked from, you'll find that the 1% (globally) comprises about half the population of the US.

It's you, in other words.

I made two distinct statements. I did not try to support the second with the first one, I just recited the claims from the Oxfam report.

I agree, however, that "62 richest people own as much as poorest 50%" is really not that interesting. It might give a more astounding number to get the point across in the media coverage, but i. e. "x richest people own 50% of total wealth" would be much more interesting.

What is interesting though is that the number changed from 388 to 62 in just a few years. And the trend that the super rich become much richer even compared to very rich people. Take a look at this graph for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Census_income_discrepa...

(income discrepancies within the top 1.5% of households)

The problem is that since a few decades only a handful of people raked in all productivity gains.

Completely hypothetical but what would happen if those 62 people were "taken out" so to speak, would debt forgiveness happen or would there be more equality in the world or how do you see it play out?

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