Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity | Hacker News Reader

Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity

reuters.com

51 pointstomazz42 comments

flagged but open discussion from last night:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13407794

It's a little one sided, both in the Reuters piece, and in the media in general. Most journalist and politicians seems focused on the wealthy, but forget that the vast majority of people aren't poor because Mark Zuckerberg is rich.

Sure, the wealthy needs to pay their taxes, just like everyone else, but it's not going to magically pull 2 billion people out of poverty.

absolutely right - wealth distribution isn't a zero-sum game

I think it may be a zero sum game.

This universe and planet has finite resources. There is only so much iron/steel to build cars, rare earth metals to build electronics.. Fundamentally that's a zero sum game?

Sure in the recent short term, we've got lucky that population was small relative to planet size and we got significantly better each year at extracting resources. Even if we get lucky again and find a way to extract resources from space and energy from some amazing new tech. At some point that too levels off, especially as population keeps increasing exponentially, but energy capture/generation does not. Then we are back to zero sum game.

Historically most tribes/kings etc got rich at the expense of the workers/slaves they exploited. Wealth distribution has and long term mostly will be zero sum, or so it seems to me?

There is only so much iron/steel to build cars

Steel doesn't really have an innate value, the value only comes when you've turned your steel into cars. If someone comes up with really clever way to make the same car using 30% less steel then we've effectively increased the total value of a fixes amount of steel and thus we are no longer looking at a zero-sum game.

Sure in a large enough time scale there are only so many atoms in the universe and you can't fight thermodynamics (we think...), but that kind of argument is really interesting when looking at a practical level and time frame.

>> when looking at a practical level and time frame.

Consider the current rate of population growth: 2017 7,515,284,153 2010 6,929,725,043 2000 6,126,622,121

Roughly 1.28% growth per year. Unless you are able to make a car using 30% less steel EVERY 21 years you are in trouble within "a practical time frame". Oh and you also need to reduce the emissions by 30% every 21 years per person just to maintain current pollution levels.

Exponential growth is a beautiful thing for income, not so good for consumption.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jul/07/research.waste

At some point, "extracting" resources from landfills becomes economically viable.

This is the beauty of the market - interests are balanced against one another and an equilibrium is reached. If more people want cars than can be built, prices go up and demand goes down. Someone out there finds a way to make cars more cheaply, which reduces per-unit resources costs, allowing more people access to them.

Also, overpopulation is never going to be an issue in the sense that you're considering here. Population growth is inversely correlated to economic success, to the point that developed nations have reproduction rates below that of replacement. As people are raised out of poverty the world's population growth will slow, and if we are successful at eliminating poverty, reverse.

Neither the universe or the planet has finite resources... in a practical sense.

100K years ago, all resources of Europe were barely enough to sustain a few tens of thousands of humans. With agriculture and metal technologies, it went up to a few millions, just because metals, wood or fields were new resources. Industrial revolution meant lots more people could live in cities, because coal were a new resource. Same happened with petrol or uranium in the XXth century: new resources, more people could live better where previous resources were scarce.

We have no reason to think it will be different in the future and we will stop uncovering new resources that will let us live better. In any case, the rate of discovering new resources has done nothing but increase its pace all through history.

> The eight individuals named in the report are [Microsoft's Bill] Gates, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, veteran investor Warren Buffett, Mexico's Carlos Slim, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

With the exception of Ortega, Buffett and Slim, that's a lot of wealth concentrated in tech. Hmm...

Bezos is borderline retail

> With the exception of Ortega, Buffett and Slim, that's a lot of wealth concentrated in tech. Hmm...

How is this surprising?

Yeah, i find it always funny when so called futurists say:"The AI Revolution will lead to a few Tech-Barons owning everything without any possible recourse for the rest of society." To which the obvious reply is: "I thought they had already won that battle?

The real issue is here is how much assets with finite supply and cruicial to human existence (e.g. food and water supply, real estate, cruicial technology) can be brought under control of few individuals with such wealth. For example if someone buys the majority of land, there will not be an easy way out even if the monetary wealth distribution will change.

I am wondering why isn't it more often discussed that wealth yields assets that yields even more wealth, because this is how capitalism is set up. This means that the situation cannot be easily improved because wealthy individuals have supeior knowledge and assets to enrich themselves further.

It's been frequently discussed, even more since the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

(which is thematically centered on wealth concentration)

You hit the nail on the head.

I don't care how rich the rich are as long as our systems are set up to guarantee a minimum level of access to basic resources including housing, drinkable water, food, internet access, safety, healthcare and education.

As long as these minimums are guaranteed with a large buffer (and every century the minimums go up) I am fine with the wealthy having a lot of money. In our system, the banks invest that money anyway, when the rich aren't using it. These investments represent belief about future demand -- which may result more and more in a plutocracy. But as long as the rest of humanity lives comfortably, I don't care.

Safety nets produce real choice. They allow you to spend time raising your kids and educating them. The kids can join the new knowledge-based workforce. You can as well, since you can take time off to learn. We can maybe travel to the stars.

But without the basic guarantees (vouchers, single payer based) many people are stuck in dead end jobs or worse, grinding poverty. It's like a poker tournament where most people have a really small stack AND can't afford to fly out of the tournament. So much wasted opportunity for human knowledge.

The other thing is smashing the knowledge silos - patents on drugs etc. The way science and open source grew is that anyone could stand on the shoulders of giants and their contributons added to the growing body of knowledge. That's how you serve the long tail eg cure malaria the same way wikipedia has articles on obscure topics and linux runs on toasters. Public platforms outperform private ones.

To sum up: tax the robots, guarantee the basic safety net, put education online and use colleges for tutoring and certification only, promote patentleft for drugs and open source for software.

However looking at the 8 names on the list, non of them are great land owners or the inheritors of massive fortunes or business empires. They're 'normal' hard working people who came up with a clever idea and worked really really hard (and got very lucky)

This is an incredibly misleading statistic because they use NET wealth, which means that they subtract your debt from your wealth. That means that if you have more debt than wealth (not necessarily a bad thing), you have negative wealth. This is the case for roughly 40% of the world's population.

This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than the poorest 2.85 billion people in the world. It's also the same metric Donald Trump used in that story his daughter liked to tell, about him walking past a homeless person and saying "that guy is 700 million dollars richer than me".

Income and wealth inequality is a huge problem, but stats like these are incredibly misleading and shouldn't be used to make the argument.

> This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than the poorest 2.85 billion people in the world.

But isn't that true? If you are not born into a family that will give you a huge dept and a second mortgage on the house, you are better of.

No, not necessarily. Cash flow matters more than debt. Spending all the money that you earn and keeping your net worth at 0 is actually a great way to live (at least until you retire). Being born into a family with huge debt is likely giving you above average income potential. I'd rather be worrying about being born into the family with just a little debt, but struggling to pay it off.

> Being born into a family with huge debt is likely giving you above average income potential.

I don't understand that. A family with a huge dept is a badly managed family. How can there be anything good coming from that?

In order to get huge debt you need to be able to demonstrate a high income potential, high enough to convince the creditor to lend you that kind of money. If you have huge debt, it's likely you can pay it off sooner or later. Also, you won't get it as an uneducated working class family. The background of a huge debt family usually results in an above-average income for the offspring.

I don't really need to demonstrate anything with credit cards looking to the US for example. Thinking of those nasty dept packages that got so prominent 2008.

For the curious:

The eight individuals named in the report are Gates, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, veteran investor Warren Buffett, Mexico's Carlos Slim, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Isn't it more important to look at how the absolute wealth of the poorest, than the relative wealth?

If poverty if viewed as a lack of resources for certain individuals, then understanding the allocation and distribution of resourced over all of humanity is relevant as a means to understand the problem.

It is if you care about the poorest.

It isn't if you care about your message and narrative.

Oxfam released a similar stat last year, and the BBC's More or Less team didn't think much of it. The wealth numbers they're using aren't necessarily well-behaved when they're totted up the way Oxfam has done, as there are a lot of cases where wealth as-measured isn't an intuitive measure of "richness". For example, a new graduate with tens of thousands in loan debt will still have a chance at better long-term income than someone with neither the qualification nor the loan who has higher numeric worth.

That said, it's harder to find examples where the a high wealth implies a low buying power, so this doesn't necessarily contradict the crux of the piece. Either way, it's worth being skeptical of misapplied statistics.

Sources: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26613682 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03fj84x

These measures I don't think are a good way to measure, because I think there's a difference between someone who's very wealthy on paper because of high stock prices, and someone whose's wealth because they got a disproportionate share of income. The latter represents money diverted in the here and now to someone else, and the former represents money that can be diverted in the future. Of course, you can ask Elizabeth Holmes how much of a billionaire she is now with Theranos, as an example of how paper wealth doesn't always translate.

It's possible for someone to be very IPO stock rich, but not actually have received much income. This is especially true for founders who started with their stock, instead of being given it as a bonus.

Agreed. It's still an indicator, although it shouldn't be taken alone. The yearly energy consumption of a person is another that is often recognized as relevant, especially since the duration of our species is now determined by our glasshouse gas emissions.

This is better explained by the amount of impoverished people in the world.

I thought poverty was down! I would rather fight inequality by eliminating poverty. Tax the robots and redistribute wealth to social safety nets!

What if those 8 people spent all of their wealth buying goods and services from those poor people?

To spend all of that wealth, every fish would have to be caught, every forest mowed down, every drop of oil burned, to have enough natural resources to spend all of that money.

I'm sure I'm wrong and others will correct me, but I still can't help but feel it's in some ways good that the wealth is so concentrated it can never be fully spent.

Consumption of resources is measured in trillions of dollars per year.

These incredibly wealthy people have captured a very small slice of overall human productivity.

It's amazing how little they actually have to spend to make people think they are philanthropic, and not just greedy assholes.

I was surprised to see Zuck and Larry on the Giving Pledge list, not that they gave, to your point, but at least they've promised to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge

Throw your name on a list, throw a couple bucks you'll never miss at someone, and have a couple pressers. The wealth inequality gap is enormous, and we celebrate the people doing it.

note that half of that lot have given pretty much all their wealth to charity. There is an argument that their ability to deploy that wealth to good effect is far greater than that of the american govt? In away - its a very positive message

The alternative would have been to tax them more and use the tax results to help people. Let's compare:

Taxes:

  - Predictable income
  - Democratic control over the spending
  - Big risk of misuse due to lobbying

Charity:

  - No predictability, depends on the whim of those who could spend
  - No democratic control
  - Small risk of misuse due to lobbying

I welcome everyone to add to both lists. From my comment history it should be pretty clear that I'm not a fan of hoping that those with money are in a charitable mood, but I know there's a strong faction with an opposing view of the world, which could help balancing such a list.

- Taxes are largely avoidable by those with sufficient wealth.

- Taxes reduce economic development by those who control capital.

- Taxes reduce charitable giving, especially by those in the upper middle class.

- Charity doesn't require the implication of violence for noncompliance.

- Charity encourages more direct management and oversight by those who give.

I would also argue that "No democratic control" is not true for charity, but rather that control is biased in favor of those who control capital.

> I welcome everyone to add to both lists. From my comment history it should be pretty clear that I'm not a fan of hoping that those with money are in a charitable mood, but I know there's a strong faction with an opposing view of the world, which could help balancing such a list.

Note that my suggestions are not accusatory, but in the spirit of this statement.

"I (/my company) should be allowed to avoid my taxes because the government will just waste the money" Is a pretty antidemocratic sentiment. You may think it's inefficient but you're a constituency of one and you don't get to make that call for everyone in the country.

What's more, that half are focusing their philanthropy carefully where they can make an impact on humanity.

The (Buffet and) Gates foundation, for example, have reported new malaria cases are down 25 pct globally.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mala...

Greed is good, baby...I mean poor people

This stuff gets eaten up in the UK by people like its crack cocaine and oxfam have an agenda to push to tunnel more funding their way.

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