Ten richest men have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1B people
oxfam.org
oxfam.org
For example, claims that "wealth inequality result in X deaths" seem clearly manipulative. It's not "inequality" of wealth, whatever that actually means, that kills them. If everyone had at least enough wealth to be physically and mentally healthy you could still have massive wealth inequality. Ergo, if wealth inequality can exist without the associated deaths then wealth inequality isn't the cause.
Do you agree with my assessment? Why or why not?
Lack of sanitation, food, etc… do cause deaths.
Lack of equality is a fact of life. It cannot kill.
Thanks. I agree with you totally.
Lack of wealth is lack of power, and with a sufficient lack of wealth one has no power even over ones own living situation. That kind of thing is bad for people-- because they rent they have continuous uncertainty and can't change or build, which I think are human instincts which it costs something to suppress. Think of it as being restricted to working only on the production branch of a software project, where anythings done incorrectly has consequences for others.
The wealthy has that much money in part because they don't have to compete with anyone else. This is especially true if you consider land, which are basically horded by the upper strata of society, and we allowed people to build wealth through property ownership rather than efficient use of land.
You get strange words like "robust housing market" due to rising land price as if that's a good thing. Everyone who's looking to buy a home or rent get screwed by the market.
Once you introduce competition and reward the wealthy for proper allocation not land hording, the stark inequality will likely be lower while the pie itself gets bigger.
Wealth inequality based upon "the magic of compounding" is essentially unsustainable legalized financial parasitism.
Rents, dividends, interest payments - when this component of the economy grows faster than the productive component (r>g) then the parasites are slowly killing the host.
The mask slipped off during covid somewhat when we saw how badly paid almost all of the workers labeled "essential" really were.
To me that's the same logic, but maybe I'm wrong.
If 10 monkeys hoarded as much bananas as 3.1B monkeys we would seek to exterminate those monkeys and wipe out their genetic footprint from the face of the earth (this latter part would be genocidal, not recommended, but some would harbor the thought) because it would be clear that they're causing a huge imbalance in the system, and a great deal of suffering. But if the monkeys are Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, we put them on the covers of magazines and consider them an extreme example of success.
Obviously, we're being manipulated to think that such extreme hoarding is what successful people must do and that it is a good thing. "Greed is good" and all of that.
Added later in response to the "pie is not fixed" and the "economy is not a zero-sum game":
There are limited resources on this planet. You can't have massive population growth with 10 people holding as much leverage to consume those limited resources as nearly half of the population and still have a balanced system. We can talk about systems that exist in non-equilibrium states but massive imbalance when it comes to the allocation of finite resources coupled with population growth is equivalent to massive suffering
Yet another clarification:
It's not just the actual consumption but also the leverage/power to consume and the power to give, which holds political power over the rest of the group, as they can use that as a carrot for politicians and non-profits. They have the power to do so much good as well as the power to do not much good, or even anti-good. It causes suffering for a few to hold that much power.
Try to transcend the metaphor and build your more accurate picture of what is being conveyed rather than just dismissing that there is anything wrong with the current picture.
One last thought on this:
The basic problem is that there is a massive imbalance of power/leverage due to the massive wealth gap. In socialism, the ruling class has that power. Neither capitalism nor socialism lead to fair and balanced allocation of resources/power/leverage. We don't have to settle for either.
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I don't think they are. Not by many orders of magnitude.
Well that's easy to say, but what's your suggestion to the problem?
The current crisis we're in is not rooted in the financial system but one of underlying supply, though, and it's not possible to fix this by redistributing the resources the super-wealthy are consuming to ordinary people because they're not consuming enough. If you think of money as a claim on scarce resources, almost all the wealth of the super-wealthy is not real money. It's just an imaginary figure produced by multiplying their shareholdings by what the amount of actual money they could trade a single share for.
Our system is to have an elected government govern over a game of capitalism. By its very nature this combination accomplishes stuff by concentrating wealth in the areas where it accomplishes the most.
These accomplishments should be things like social progress, preservation of the eco system, quality of life, sustainability, resilience. We can trade some for something else for a while but the whole point of governing is to have a long term plan for everyone rather than a short term plan to expand gains for a hand full of people for a short while.
Wealth guards the opportunity to consume, as well. I really don’t understand what you mean by “not consuming enough.”
Elon Musk doesn't have "bananas". He has shares of stock in Tesla, which are largely only of value because he is running the company. Him owning that stock doesn't mean fewer "bananas" for anyone. Taking away his shares of stock won't produce any more "bananas".
> If 10 monkeys hoarded as much bananas as 3.1B monkeys we would seek to exterminate those monkeys and wipe out their genetic footprint from the face of the earth (this latter part would be genocidal, not recommended
Yeah, we're not going to let you do that again. Sorry.
Same reason why you can't solve housing shortage by just giving people more money so they can pay their rent.
> Do you agree with my assessment? Why or why not?
It’s a pretty obvious logical fallacy, though I appreciate the way you asked for more viewpoints.
The article itself argues the disparity is so vast that you could tax the 10 men to the point of them still having 8 billion more than when the pandemic started and solve a lot of global problems. It’s like saying someone having cholesterol problems couldn’t be from eating 10 cheeseburgers a day because when they dropped to eating 1 cheeseburger a day and the problems were fixed they were still eating bad food.
Eventually the amount of power and temptation for corruption will become too much for the system of justice and law to keep in check
So your question reduces to: is power zero sum? One cannot be dogmatic, but it certainly seems so.
The fact that inequality could exist without associated deaths doesn't mean that it currently does.
It is very possible that right now, inequality causes deaths, even if it could exist in a different context that didn't, except that's not necessarily the current context.
In our current context, it could be true that if we reduced inequality by distributing less wealth at the top and more at the bottom, that it could prevent many deaths, by providing many billions of people with the means to be mentally and physically healthy as you say.
Thus it's possible in our current context that we'd have the means for everyone to have enough wealth to be mentally and physically healthy, but that the inequality in the distribution of that wealth causes some not to have enough, and thus their premature deaths.
I still just say could, because this too is hypothetical. It is possible without the incentives of massive inequality that the wealth wouldn't be created in the first place, or that any other phenomenon would cause different outcomes.
A billionaire investing his capital in the business providing work and quality products for society is great. What I don't like is underpaying employees, shady businesses with low value and abusing the legal system.
I'm rather uncomfortable with it myself I suppose but I never thought my own slight discomfort was ever worth bringing up in this context.
I have decent imagination, if someone dies in front of my nose or behind a curtain the emotional impact is ideally the same. I cant get there of course but my ambition is to experience those exactly the same.
In a world with finite resources we have to do a fair bit of rationing or accept that some will get it all.
Our discomfort is therefore caused by the complete lack of rationing and we should attempt to address the issue there. Then we quickly see what little we can do because bureaucratic power (to call it that) is also not distributed sensibly.
When the few oppose the many and there is no hope for sensible dialog the natural way to progress is to resort to mass violence.
If the 10 richest men can do something to slow or stop the suffering of billions and we cant it in my view becomes their responsibility. It becomes the direct result of their actions. It is as good as killing them yourself. say by shooting though the curtain.
Therefore one side of the war (the few) have already engaged in the killing of the other side (the many). We are so many that we've barely noticed it.
You can expect that if they chose to play their game against you they wont hesitate to take it all and you too will lose everything.
Your story would be as uncomfortable to read for others but that is just a symptom. We can safely ignore it.
Is wealth defined as: - enough resources for driving a Ferarri wherever and whenever you want unregarding anybody else
Or is wealth defined as: - enough resources for shelter - enough resources for food - enough resources to get an educated - enough resources for getting assistence when in need - having the possibility to reach something like self realization (to prosper)
Myself is thinking, that not having the posibility to go for self realization, will on average kill a lot of spirits.
Now being able to drive a Ferrari everywhere you want could possibly also offset the average life expectancy of those who the ability to do that (as in Ferarri cliff jumping), so maybe there are more things to compare.
And maybe wealth is exactly the correct summarizing word, if the opposite of wealth/abundance is scarcity.
Second, the amount of wealth is not fixed. Someone having more doesn't mean that others have less. I think many people don't understand where money comes from, lending to their fears of a large wealth gap.
Do you think that is possible? Because I only see the situation getting worse and worse from here.
What we should ask ourselves is, is a system where 10 people can own six times more than 3.1B compatible with the goal of solving poverty and granting a decent life standard to everyone?
Of course it’s possible. The material standard of living of the poorest people has consistently been making huge gains since the beginning of the industrial revolution and continues to do so, despite wealth inequality. This is backed up by every objective metric you can think of.
Last century, Something included unions, progressive taxation, and wealth redistribution, and that seemed to work for a while. Previous means were much bloodier.
And other than such projects the wealth of wealthy people are resources used wisely investing in production capabilities of products people want to buy, like new CPU generations or new warehouses etc. This is how most resources governed by the wealthy is allocated, which seems entirely reasonable, having a small fraction of that get lost to their personal whims seems like a very cheap price to pay for the efficiency of capitalism compared to other systems, we already pay like 40% in taxes, why not pay 1% or so tax to capitalism?
So even if everyone could live well because the amount of money siphoned away is not to much, there would still be some unfairness in the system that I would want to see go away.
But the issue is that every billionaire mansion creates real waste. Real plastic in the ocean. Real strip mines. Real greenhouse gasses. The land they occupy is land others cannot occupy.
And besides all that, they poison our discourse with media companies that are run at a loss and they lie to us with fake scientific studies.
I think we have quite more pressing problems than that right now.
That's apparently supposed to ameliorate how bad this looks but as far as I can see it only serves to emphasize how bad the problem is.
Wealth comparisons generally are fraught even besides this. The most valuable asset of the average human, by far, is their human capital. These and social services and purchasing power parities can be measured and compared for a more meaningful result, and highlight the truly poor, but this piece isn’t it. It’s just agitprop.
Yes, and if you are a doctor saving lives with a high income and high negative wealth that human capital is being parasitically extracted via the rent you pay, via student loan repayments, via eye watering malpractice insurance rates and laundered via the financial system to make somebody else even richer.
Dont you see how this makes it even worse? The greater wealth inequality grows the less you get to keep the output of your own human capital.
And yea, maybe you can still do all of that and live a decent enough life. That isnt the point.
This isnt a revolt against productivity. It's a revolt against parasites.
That's an assumption that needs to be backed up.
Many high-net worth individuals have almost zero nominal income - yet they are still extremely wealthy, enjoy a high standard of living and have significant influence. This can make income-only "wealth" statistics look a lot more balanced than the reality is.
On the other hand, debt absolutely has an effect on your quality of living and the degree of freedom you have in your decisions. E.g., if someone barely manages to pay off a mortgage, they will have little disposable income for other expenses, such as medical emergencies - even though, on the face of it, they may have a decent middle-class income.
Combining them and crystallizing future income into a theoretical asset wont materially affect the picture.
This is the outcome we're supposed to be celebrating? Sky high productivity having huge chunks taken out of it and being handed over to non-working landlords and creditors?
> The second lesson of this story is broader: that when you’re talking about poor people, aggregating wealth is a silly and ultimately pointless exercise. Some poor people have modest savings; some poor people are deeply in debt; some poor people have nothing at all.
That seems like just muddying the waters to avoid some uncomfortable conclusions.
By the way, buried in the center of the article, the author actually admids that the essence of the findings - highlighting the extreme wealth inequality - is correct:
> Now $1.7 trillion is undoubtedly a lot of money: there is an astonishing amount of wealth inequality in the world, and it’s shocking that just 67 people are worth that much.
1. Start a company 2. Issue 1_000_000 shares to yourself 3. Find a friend who owes you a favor, then issue another share in the company and sell it to them for $1000
This is an extreme example, but most of the people on the world's richest list have been able to similarly inflate their net worth through illiquidity. Market caps are a misleading way to measure wealth. To take another example, the market cap of Tesla is based less on the company's physical assets than the anticipation of earnings over the next 20-30 years. My own net worth would look a lot better if it was calculated using the same methodology.
I'm not trying to argue that inequality doesn't exist, but I think this obsession with the paper value of the 1-percenters is a distraction from the fact that reducing inequality needs to ultimately involve the redistribution of physical assets and labor. If we get obsessed with confiscating the abstract financial assets of billionaires, we will likely find out they don't have much buying power when being traded for real things like housing or energy.
I think in the end it comes back to comparing capital. Which sounds a bit familiar...
The efficient market hypothesis lasts right up until you examine the wealth of billionaires in aggregate, apparently.
Yet when Bill Gates or Bezos want to sell off their stock to fund their various hobbies they have no problem doing so.
And if it is true for a non neglibile number of billionaires, so what? If we tax their wealth and a lot of it turned out to be smoke and mirrors that will, if anything, aid price discovery and lead to more efficient markets. Maybe the middle classes will buy fewer of their crappy assets as a result.
That's because they don't actually spend that much of their wealth. If Bezos and Musk spent their entire fortune on their space companies, rockets technology would improve, but not to the scale of $300+ billion. Once they approach a certain level, every rocket scientist is working at maximum capacity our pipeline of training becomes bottlenecked.
>If we tax their wealth and a lot of it turned out to be smoke and mirrors that will, if anything, aid price discovery and lead to more efficient markets
I would agree if I could trust politicians with that amount of responsibility, but I don't. The majority of them don't seem to understand basic supply and demand or are intentionally pretending not to so they can pander to their voters.
From what I remember Bill Gates is on track to spend almost all of it.
I've always found the idea that billionaire wealth isnt "real" because liquidating it all simultaneously is impractical to be unconvincing in the extreme, verging on dishonest.
>I would agree if I could trust politicians with that amount of responsibility
Politicians are not actually restrained by taxation as decades of persistent deficits prove.
I find it helps to consider a thought experiment: what if every dollar taxed was burned to a crisp and every dollar spent by government was printed?
The answer is nothing. Taxation exerts a deflationary effect and spending exerts an inflationary effect.
The question I ask when I consider if a higher tax is necessary is "are inflationary pressures too high?"
I think it's clear that inflationary pressures in housing and asset markets is off the scale.
Is he? He's wealthier than he has ever been.
> I've always found the idea that billionaire wealth isnt "real" because liquidating it all simultaneously is impractical to be unconvincing in the extreme, verging on dishonest.
Of course it's real. My point is that it isn't really as much wealth as people make it out to me. Much of it is simply a consequence of the mega-rich already having everything they want. Therefore, it requires a lot of goods and services to "buy" the wealth of the mega-rich.
> Politicians are not actually restrained by taxation as decades of persistent deficits prove.
Of course they're restrained. They're just choosing to stretch these restraints as much as they can. If they raise more in taxes, they can delay the eventual problems that arise from our deficit.
> I think it's clear that inflationary pressures in housing and asset markets is off the scale.
I'd agree that we can use a land value tax and higher capital gains tax, but that's not what the Democrats seem to want. Instead, they'd rather punish the productive upper-middle class with higher income taxes (admittedly, this where I am). Meanwhile Prop 18 is going strong in California, and NYC's most expensive apartments have the lowest property taxes as well.
You can use your net worth to get astronomical loans to reinvest and multiply your income. You can use your shares in too-big-to-fail companies as a leverage to blackmail governments into doing your interest, and so on.
I understand the feeling of "it's not fair" (especially if you got the short end of the stick), but really, what is really fair other than random chance?
It's quite hard to correct for an emergent phenomenon, I mean, something that seems to be a statistical property of the collective behavior of a large group of entities. Changing anything will have unintended consequences, since it's very difficult to predict the effects (as of why is this, I think non-linearity plays a big part, but that's a longer topic).
My suspicion is that the middle-ages originated worldviews of western society are shifting now.
Oversimplifying, there are two worldviews that come from religion in western cultures as far as I can tell.
Catholic based worldviews, view poverty as a virtue, wealth as a sin (think Latin America). On the other hand protestant worldviews tend to think wealth is a sign of being good morally (US, UK, and some european countries).
Lately, there's a shift in these, with the first one slowly showing its face in classically protestant countries, and a radicalization of the "poverty is good" view in historically catholic countries.
As to why this is happening, it could be just a consequence of increased communication (i.e. everyone can voice an opinion online/see what's really going on far away) or something better organized.
This fortune was so vast that Augustus was able to pay to recruit, train, and upkeep the entire Roman military- all 60 legions- alone. In addition, he was able to fund multiple grand building projects, massive political reforms, and keep a tidy fortune for himself and his heirs. Augustus became the Defacto state.
These are rough numbers because currency conversion across 2 millennia is impossible. Augustus was worth at least 1/3 of the Roman Empires' total GDP. This means of every 3 dollars in the Roman Economy 1 dollar was Augustus’.
Wealth concentration disrupts society and makes society susceptible autocratic holders of wealth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus#First_settlement https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Augustus
I think the same could be true of having an extremely disproportionate amount of resources. Humans are just not evolved for that and it makes them behave strangely.
The first symptom seems to be adopting a siege mentality. To be fair, even I have felt it a bit and my net worth is only a FAANG engineer’s yearly salary.
Money maybe equivalent to power at some level, but Xi can easily make Jack Ma disappear. This means money means nothing in front of power. Power is obviously way more dangerous than money. And there’s way more inequality in power than in money.
The wealthy are all using tax avoidance schemes and corporate structures to hide their wealth.
I can certainly say, that if I was truly wealthy (and had the mindset to go with it) one of the first I would do is hide information on my wealth. Perhaps I'd even hire others to pretend to be wealthy, and take the flak, so I could go about my business.
I'm sure billionaires/trillionaires would value their privacy at least as much as I do. And they've got the funds to buy it!
I want to know why if you think that a system that thrives on wealth inequality doesn't contribute to poverty, we see median househould incomes declining while all the prices are rising and a very small class of already rich people becomes ever richer.
Instead of rewarding wealthy people for increasing the pie, we just give wealthy people free money for sitting on lands and having that appreciate, rather than selling it to someone who can use it.
"Robust housing market" and rising price is not a good thing. It is a socioeconomic disaster.
Another way we becomes poorer: Pattern of development that incentivize ownership of expensive items just to participate in society, like cars and roads.
I was explaining why that statement is actually often correct. When I buy a phone, wealth inequality gets worse but yet it is still a positive sum trade.
The system doesn't thrive on wealth inequality. Wealth inequality is a mere byproduct of forces like the tremendous scale afforded by capital markets and technology, the unequal distribution of the extreme end of intelligence, the increasing relevance of intelligence in the context of modern technology, the rise of China as a competitor for our lower classes, and so on.
That's another way of saying that while it doesnt necessarily have to make another man poor in reality thats precisely what is happening.
Watch out for that envy, it's a mighty dangerous thing. The only one of the 7 deadly sins that isn't any fun.
Too much wealth also means using more of limited resources (like land), being able to influence laws and escaping justice.
https://income-inequality.info/
Comparing income distributions within countries and between countries in increments of 5% of the population in one unified graph.
You can re-run the calculations yourself https://github.com/whyboris/income-inequality.info & https://github.com/whyboris/Global-Income-Distribution
Typical output:
10%: $10
20%: $20
Median: $70
80%: $165
90%: $235
99%: $475
99.9%: $705
Top 10 list: $1280, $1255, $1245, $1070, $1020, $1010, $1005, $995, $990, $965
I hope no one is going to accuse the random number generator of being rigged by capitalists at Microsoft. That’s simply how the math works.
Wealth inequality is natural. The real socio-economical issue is poverty, not wealth inequality.
Do autocracies have a history of freedom of the press? Can you think of many examples?