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Comment by ryeguy_24 | Hacker News Reader

> "388 individuals possessed as much household wealth as the lower half of the world's population combined"

My goodness! This completely shocked me. I wonder if we are all complicit in allowing this to happen. I know wealth buys power and vice versa, so it likely would be hard to change but aren't we all indirectly allowing this to happen?

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It's even more shocking than you may have realized. Not sure if you caught it because you may have been too surprised or just read quickly, but that was the 2010 number. The current number is estimated to be a mere 26 people that hold as much as the lower half!

yes, source: https://www.oxfam.org/en/5-shocking-facts-about-extreme-glob...

Be cautious about these statistics looking at wealth only. A lot of people have high incomes, but effectively zero or negative wealth, because they spend it all.

Some of the shifts in wealth inequality are changes in how much money people are saving/investing.

For reference, the 3 richest Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 50% of the country.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-ric...

In fairness, I have more wealth than 33% of the USA combined, given that something like a third have zero or negative wealth.

Oh that's an interesting point I hadn't considered, thanks for mentioning that!

This is somewhat misleading as the bottom of the curve has a negative net worth, so you have to go pretty far up the curve before you even hit 0 wealth.

Please don't automatically turn to socialism as the solution to this. Over-regulation is in part responsible for the crony capitalism we're in. You will find that most of these 388 individuals are heavily invested in lobbying to make sure regulations are on their side and hindering their competitors.

So it is our collective fault ?

We are.

Everytime we shut up in meetings when dumb sleezy managers come up with dumb ideas.

Everytime we implement those ideas. And let someone else sell them and use them.

Everytime when we pretend that our jobs are just a paycheck.

So yeh if we don't throw them under the buss no one will.

#underthebuss

Complicit implies a negative moral or ethical slant, but we are directly responsible, sure. We live in a representative democracy, so we can just ask for a bill to redistribute wealth and vote on it. The reason people don't is the same reason poor people support politicians that give the rich tax breaks.

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