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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

> Together, they now own three times more than the poorest half of humanity, or 2.8 billion adults. While the gap has stabilized since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has grown sharply over recent decades: Back in 1995, the 0.001% held "only" twice as much as the poorest half.

Important context: here debt is counted as negative. This means a person with no debt but zero wealth also owns more wealth than bottom 20% or so cumulatively because the debts of people cancel out with others wealth. I think this is misleading.

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Why is it misleading? Debt is negative wealth. Being indebted to the very rich puts you lower than people who at least have nothing. Would it be less misleading for you if they silently ignored bottom 20% of people?

Because of the lifestyle you can live while in debt. If you're driving expensive cars and living in nice houses and eating good food because you pay for it with a credit card, sure, you're in debt, but your life is better than someone that isn't using a credit card to pay for things. Are you going hungry? is the question.

Life in debt is better for now. But it will be way worse in the future if things won't go your way and they most likely won't. There's plenty of people willing to indebt almost everybody, because it's profitable. They sell temporary life above means for future wage slavery.

The question is, do your really believe loan sharks and other lenders are saviors of the poor?

In absence of lenders the issue of poor people would need to be solved systemically. Instead the government abstains and lets poor sell themselves to the highest bidder.

When it comes to calculating wealth in the context of social justice it's absolutely correct to count debt as negative.

> do your really believe loan sharks and other lenders are aviors of the poor?

How and what I believe society should be organized and who is good and bad has nothing to do with how society is.

Debt is negative, but it's that you can't just smush the two numbers together and have a valid comparison. A pauper with $0 to their name, living on the streets, and a person living in a $1 million house with $1 million in debt are living two very different lives.

Yes, people underwrite their own debt with their future labor. Economists don’t count this leverage on future labor as wealth for the poor but for some reason count it for the rich after renaming it to bonds.

while debt might be well marketed as acceptable, I worry that you have allowed yourself to consider it not real: if someone is in debt to the bank for the majority of their homes value of 300k while earning 50k PA and then someone else pays 10k rent PA but earns 40k PA then the person on 40k is still wealthier

Not quite - because the person with the 300k house still owns the house. They have a 300k asset and <300k in debt. (assuming house value didn't crash after they bought it.

Somehow I'm not inspired to believe that being misleading was a mistake, given the topic

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