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Comment by qaq | Hacker News Reader

And yet account for all of that and divide it across remaining population and it will come out to nothing. The majority of their wealth is super inflated assets that would not change anyones life if divided across the population.

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According to Wikipedia, in 2016 the Top 500 richest Germans, owned a combined wealth of 692 Mrd. €. That's around 8500 EUR per German citizen (infants and kids included) in 2016 - more today. For some people that is an amount that substantially affects their life.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_500_reichsten_Deutsc...

that includes real estate in Monaco priced at 100K per square meter, works of arts jewels, stocks trading at 100+ PE etc. e.g. sh#t not convertible into shelter, food and other things people need. It's not that elastic on a gloabl scale.

The majority of this is ownership, for example the Quandt family owns nearly 50% of BMW. Stefan Quandt alone owns 25% of BMW. It's pretty elastic - and that wealth share of 700 billion is owned by 500 out of 80 Million people or 0.000625% of the population.

You are assuming that thats convertible to something tangible which it isn't at global scale. We just had a large scale experiment in this area with Covid. Food prices went up real estate is through the roof.

> The majority of this is ownership, for example the Quandt family owns nearly 50% of BMW.

This is still based on two massive misunderstandings:

1. This share is cash, when it is not. It is just evaluated as a cash value for simplicity. Removing these people's shareholding does not make actual money appear.

2. People have to buy shares in order for them to be worth anything. Why would anyone buy shares in your world?

Yes, but you are liquidating the companies they own. If you consume them, they become much smaller, which means they have less employees, less work, less income, etc.

This is consuming capital for expenditures, which will in a macro view reduce wages in the long term.

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