World's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam

FYI Kerviel's job termination was ruled abusive and the French government is now asking SocGen to pay back the 2.2bn tax break they got in 2008.

Because it gives weird outcomes like a when newly graduated lawyer with a $200K salary and a massive student debt is considered much poorer than someone in sub-Saharan Africa earning $2 a day but is debt free.

This is misleading. Firstly, in most countries with VAT, goods considered basic necessities, like food, tends to be zero rated or have lower VAT rates. Secondly, VAT is only paid on goods and often services you buy, not on e.g. mortgage payments or other debt, or rent (most places).

As an example, though at an income well above average, last time I checked VAT raised my effective tax rate by ~4 percentage points, despite the 20% UK headline VAT rate.

Very low earners also tends to pay relatively little VAT, as a much larger proportion of their income tends to go to rent or things that are exempt. As a result most poor people pay those 20% (or whatever local rate) at only a small proportion of their overall income.

VAT is still a problematic tax, as it has a disproportionately negative effect for poor people once they do earn a bit extra and want to spend it on something not considered a basic necessity (and the categories that are exempt do tend to be quite narrow). It can certainly drive their effective tax rate up well above the headline income tax rate for their income level even with very small proportions of income spent on full rated things. It also causes a "bulge" effect, where low to middle earners sees the largest effect (as high earners tends to invest and save a large proportion of their income; and in the UK and many other places are also more likely to afford to take advantage of a lot of other tax breaks)

People with a house (of any kind) or property are typically not part of the poorest 50% of the people.

A world where all people have equal worth is a world where nobody has anything, because there will always be someone who will trade their worth for present pleasures and then have less than everyone else.

It is possible to have a perfectly unequal world where everyone is comfortable, and one entity controls everything. Indeed, something approximating this is the idealised equilibrium that underpins what 'a good capitalist society' could look like, if faeries were real.

The idea in practice is that the people who make the best decisions get all the wealth, so resources are productively utilised, then anyone who wants something does enough wok to produce it (but working in their own area instead of building it themselves).

The problem in the modern era is stuff like the 2008 financial crisis, where the mechanisms to take money away from idiot capitalists (ie, bankruptcy of major corporations) have been short-circuited and disabled.

How likely do you think that is, and why do you think it's getting more and more likely? If anything, the wealth and power these days is way more dispersed than a couple hunderd years ago when a few royalty held most of wealth/power/property. Like there's untold numbers of billionaires in China/Africa/Saudi Arabia/UAE/Europe/USA etc, and there's more on their way. In addition, the "turnover" of wealth seems to be faster and faster, and self-made billionaires dominate most rich-people lists (which however ignore most Arab dictators). Sure, it's possible that technology fundamentally changes that dynamic (e.g. by making 100% surveillance and oppression possible) in the future but that's not where the world is at right now.

They probably would. However, I think they would be in the top 50% in wealth terms and not the the bottom 50%

Hence e.g. Proudhon's "property is theft". What is "objective justice based on rule of law and property rights" to you, some see as a perverse use of violence to restrict the liberty of others

Incidentally it is quite fascinating that you tie opposition to property rights as "statist, gun-point wealth redistribution" when the opposition to property rights originally came with the firmest opposition to the state. Proudhon was the founder of anarchism. Most others who argued against property rights argued against it from the point of view that property rights only exist through violence, and that the state is the ultimate guarantor of enforcement of what they see as coercion.

Whatever point of view one has on how justified property rights are, presenting it as "objective" is ludicrous.

Getting back to your points:

> food

We already (can) produce way more food than we consume. The main problem is distributing it and the lack of economic incentives to make this distribution global and fair.

> housing

We have the tech and resources to provide everyone adequate non-slum housing. It's again a problem of global and fair distribution. More than that, more people need to accept that we need more high density urban environments. This point will come back later :)

> energy

From an energy point of view, we're kind of at the "food" point. The real challenge is converting energy production to renewables. Which brings us to...

> not wrecking the planet

We absolutely have all the tech and know-how to not wreck the planet. But it's a tragedy of the commons.

Not wrecking the planet is the final end game, the ultimate cooperative move. Heck, it's the final anti-zero sum game move.

I think many would dispute this point, at least in a general sense; although personally I might agree that current governments seem a bit paralysed in the face of some of global society's larger problems.

It does seem like we are living in an almost Victorian era age of high profile philanthropy/industrial barons.

Mmmm, some. Of the 26 I found, 7 inherited.

The man also knows how to farm. What looks like forest, or jungle, to you, is actually the man's farm--has been, for generations. But that was last year: men came with guns, fenced off the forest, logged it, and now it's all a palm oil plantation, stretching toward the horizon in all directions. The man and his family were offered "jobs", earning a pittance, barely enough for survival, buying rice imported from halfway across the world. Because some other man wanted to be wealthy.

The man can't manage his resources, because there is no legal framework for him to do it. The people who claimed to create a free-market, "teaching the man how to fish", etc, actually created the present situation, so may be looked at today with some suspicion.

And no, there is no such thing as a "healthy capitalist economy", capitalism is by definition based on exploitation of the less fortunate. Saying such things is obviously heresy to the Silicon Valley set and capitalists in general, but it's the uncomfortable truth.

Living in poverty is likely to develop a mindset, in order to survive, that won't scale pulling you back out of poverty. That is, where you never start making smart financial decisions or plan ahead because, you know, the life is a mess enough because of various factors due to having little or no money or peers telling you to act otherwise.

There have been a number of discussions and even anecdotal comments on HN to probe into this. For example, feeling lucky at Google gave me this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461773

The focus rather should be on health/nutrition outcomes, education outcomes, physical safety, quality of housing.

And this question is... is it getting better?

Factfulness says yes. Slowly, but surely, yes.