World's Top 26 Billionaires Now Own as Much as the Poorest 3.8B | Hacker News Reader

World's Top 26 Billionaires Now Own as Much as the Poorest 3.8B

time.com

31 pointskushti37 comments

More discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18958478

What I'd like to see more in these articles is an acknowledgement of how power laws work (or perhaps log-normal distributions or stretched exponential distributions https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.0212).

Is this one of those things where the vast majority of the 3.8B has a zero or negative net worth?

I'm not trying to deny anything about wealth inequality, but I wonder what this clickbaity statement really says about anything.

I agree completely.

Someone living hand to mouth subsidence farming has about $0.

Someone who went to a top quality law school, or medical school. Who has a nice car on lease, and a hefty mortgage, maybe a bit of credit card debt. But who is also brining in 6 figures. could have -$X00,000.

In my opinion the second person has more 'wealth' than the first person. But on paper, the education and opportunities are not counted. But the debt needed to pay for these is counted.

You get the opposite problem when you look at just income. People who have a vast wealth, but don't work, would be counted as being very poor.

Sadly finding someone's 'wealth' is quite complicated, and doesn't make an easy headline.

Just need to find a way to put a value on intangible assets. If that diploma, for example, can bring in an extra 150 grand a year, then I would put a value of that asset at around 3 million or so (assuming a 5% return on investment). Being born in a country with opportunity brings in at least $20k a year (minimum wage), so that asset is worth 400K total. Getting stuck in a high cost of living area where you need $50K a year just to survive may have a negative one million dollar value.

>Is this one of those things where the vast majority of the 3.8B has a zero or negative net worth?

How does that make it better? If anything, it makes it worse...

That doesn't make it better or worse. That would simply show that this statistic is irrelevant and clickbaity.

Just in the US 17M households have negative net worth.

Would a title such as "A worker earning minimum wage owns as much as the 17M poorest households in the country" be honest journalism?

That would me that you alone has more money than the poorest 3.8B people, making it somewhat clickbaity to bring up the billionaires?

It says the top 26 billionaires own as much as the poorest 3.8B, not that they own more.

Unless you're worth more than the top 26 billionaires combined, you don't have the net worth to match 3.8B people.

Sure, but if 2B of that population is in the negative, then even at minimum wage I do have the net worth to match 2B; its just the next 1.8B where comparison even starts to make sense.

I don't think Forbes Billionaires List is not accurate enough to track wealth changes from year to year as Oxfam does. It can show some trends over several years at best.

https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...

I think this happens because of technological development creating and enhancing positive feedback loops due to specialization and economy of scale. Can we have similar levels of technological development without such super concentration of wealth?

Technology doesn't even need to factor into it.

Wealth creates wealth, regardless of the available gadgets. We are now at a stage where the wealthy have used their wealth to accumulate more and more wealth. And as we speak, they are using that wealth to get more and more and more.

That's the feedback loop.

The most important thing for non wealthy is organization. Sharing issues and knowledge. Instead of relying on the rich to give them solutions (no incentives to do so..)

That being one of the hopes, decades back, for the internet.

Unfortunately most of the web has become a business rarely aligned with human needs or happiness.

Still a bit of the tech can be used but it's not enough per se.

I wonder if something could be worked out with a truly decentralized, mesh network based on personal equipment.

some neighborhoods in the US have tried local internet providers, worth looking into

> The most important thing for non wealthy is organization. Sharing issues and knowledge.

What value does that have to the destitute in Rio, or on the streets New Delhi?

It's everything. You have time and knowledge and a bit of food you can climb up within a group. Otherwise you're stuck.

you need money for that

I guess I’m too cynical to believe that any attempt to go after those 26 people will land on them rather than on me - I’m comparatively well off but much less able to defend myself than a Donald Trump or a Bill Gates.

70% tax rate above $10M makes a lot of sense.

It does, but at that price point you can start paying lobbyists and politicians to help make sure it doesn't happen. Likewise, at that point you can have your money stashed in a tax haven or other financial constructions to make sure you don't have to pay taxes, even if there was such a tax rate.

The marginal tax rate might help the American poor, but for the rest of the world, where the majority of poor people are, this, on its own, isn't really going to do much good.

It lowers the incentive to develop such wildly unequal compensation packages

Some may find this reprehensible, some may not (about 26 people at last count). Regardless, this represents a gargantuan opportunity for startups.

What, creating things the 26 may want to spend on? Or trying to squeeze out some profit from 3.8 billion poor?

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