Eight men own same as poorest half of world: Oxfam
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There are a lot of people in the US that have plenty of income, but little to no wealth. In other words, their expenses match up with their income. They rent a nice house, have a large loan on their car, some credit card debt, etc. There are a lot of reasonably well off people that have a negative net worth. Would anyone living paycheck to paycheck be considered as having zero wealth? That's half of America [0]. With only 20K in my 401k, I have more wealth than half of the country by that metric.
Also, since we don't have a wealth tax, nobody has to report their personal assets, so how are these numbers calculated?
On the flip side, if you try to measure inequality of income, instead of wealth, some of the wealthiest people on earth can have years of enormous losses that hardly affect their quality of life but would put them on the bottom of the income scale.
[0]http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secre...
Granted, it is also the world's most powerful method of wealth creation, but that doesn't mean much when the people without capital don't see the rewards.
To those who disagree with me( because I'm sure there will be many), why am I wrong?
(a) more people having access to more, better products for cheaper
(b) the people making those things ipso facto prefer to be doing those jobs over alternatives
(c) if other people were previously making similar things less efficiently, they are now freed up to do something else
It's horrifying, but I don't know that I can come up with a remedy. Clearly, these men don't have other job options, and with no job, they'll just starve. And if they don't take the job, they're easily replaced with another human who will. Zero turnover expense for the employer.
The profits are not really "trickling down." Five families control this industry, and they make enormous profits ($5 million per ship, which is a 100% return). The government is easily captured / bribed to prevent much pressure about working conditions. There's no tradition of a labor movement from which these people can draw from, they're uneducated and really when you're that poor you're only able to think about today, much less where your rights are in a few years.
And let's say Bangladesh did somehow make it too expensive / burdensome to shipbreak there. I hear Somalia has no laws, and lots of young men standing around who will join in.
You try to instead convince Germany to stop sending their ships to Bangladesh to be broken in these conditions. But now, German shipping becomes a more expensive business due to the disposal costs, and German shipping companies become uncompetitive against Chinese shipping companies which will happily shipbreak in Bangladesh. Germany loses its shipping industry either by relocation of the firms to a friendly jurisdiction or they just go insolvent after losing all their business to Chinese competitors.
It really is all a race to the bottom and I don't know of a solution.