Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
A half of century ago, my grandparents were still relatively independent of the rest of the world, because they owned a house and some cultivated land, so even if their normal sources of revenue would have disappeared by becoming jobless, they could have still lived quite decently being sustained only by what they were producing in their garden and by their animals. They also did not depend on external services for things like water supply, garbage disposal or heating. They used electricity, but they had plenty of space so that today one could have used there enough solar panels to be also independent of external energy sources.
On the other hand, now I am living in a big city and I absolutely need a salary if I want to continue to live. Where I live there are no salaries for an engineer or programmer that are big enough so that one could ever buy a place like that owned by my grandparents.
I do not believe that this extreme dependency between employees and employers that has become more and more widespread during the last century will lead to anything good.
There are a lot of important technical problems that must be solved in order to ensure the survival of humanity, but the research to solve them is almost non-existent, because those who control the money are too short-sighted so they invest only according to various fads in research that will produce things of negligible benefit for most humans. The unsolved problems that have accumulated are such that only an effort of the kind that happened in the research done during World War II would solve them, but it seems unlikely that something like that will ever repeat.
The majority of human civilisation has been feudal. We recently got democracy for everyone. We are not yet out of reach of our local civilisational attractor.
To make matters worse, this year's Nobel prize in Economics went to research showing that the problem is governments, and specifically that a lot of populous countries don't create institutions to improve the welfare of people at all, but rather focused on stealing from the population. This makes it an unfixable problem in those countries. More than that, a lot of these countries' populations don't want to fix it, or even want to make it far worse (like Egypt, or Iran, or Pakistan, or Sudan) for a whole host of reasons.
Oh and most of those governments are "captured by wealth" only in the sense that the current rulers exploit the population for their personal wealth. This is what you see from Afghanistan to Venezuela, but those governments didn't come to power with wealth. Various ideologies brought these governments to power, and the governments steal the wealth of the people, even to an extent that people start dying in pretty large numbers like in Afghanistan. I also find it strange that when discussing capture by wealth no-one ever takes Venezuela as an example, despite how obvious it is that that's the problem there. Nobody discusses how Chavez came to power as a "communist" and died a billionaire.
So if you want to fix poverty, one of the things it looks like you'll have to do is to overthrow the governments ruling, actually more than half of humanity, and convince their populations to stop caring more about religion and other ideologies, like pride, or a mostly imagined enemy (like Pakistan), than about prosperity.
You can get a piece of land and have a simple house on it, get a wood stove, stop buying things that generate trash (grow your own food, etc. and compost all scraps). Raise animals like chickens and goats. Put in a well. There's a ton of guides and YouTube videos out there about people who homestead.
I know people who do this on 1-2 acres and are a couple hours from a major city. The reality is that it's a ton of work and there's downsides, it depends on what kind of person you are.
(This is responding to your specific comment, I know that choosing to do this in the developed world is different from people who have no choice and no options in a developing country/place).
I think the goal should be for everybody to have the ability to walk away from an abusive boss, landlord or spouse without jeopardizing their life essentials. Which is a stronger statement than just saying that everybody should be able to afford their life essentials.
Not having a boss or landlord is a great way of achieving this, but it's not the only way. (If you don't have a boss, you do need the freedom to turn away abusive clients or customers)
Another way is ensuring that the essentials are universally available. Universal health care, public housing and a SNAP program that's not itself abusive is another.
Another HN-popular mechanism is UBI.
Another mechanism that helps greatly is ensuring that the essentials are inexpensive. Clothing and food have become cheap, but healthcare and housing have more than absorbed the difference.
Many grandparents are too frail to dig enough spuds or work the garden - anecdotally 70s is when limitations often start to really kick in. Grandparents are now trending older?
Monaco isn't renowned for its businesses.
But yes, there is an issue with the rich investing in residential property (which good regulations could address).
I am not "arguing" this - that would be silly. This was OP comment:
> This, "If you have enough, why does it matter if someone else has more" argument doesn't really hold.
it does hold water. you can work and live in Elmo and have all your needs met while the rich&famous are chillin on a yacht in Nice
Silicon valley was backward cheap farmland that allowed students in the nearby universities to stay in an area with their college friends and start their business ideas instead of moving back home.
Anywhere there is excess energy/synergy the rich move in and try to capture it, sucking it out. You need places where society can grow, where excess energy is allowed to create excitement/progress/try new things.
See, it isn't about having stuff, it is about having power over people. That's why inequality is horrible.
Kushner, Saudi, Ellisons behind Paramount, Warner, X, ... is nothing to fear of.
“There’s so much I’m learning from being here, In the States it feels really grim; and even in the less than 24 hours that I’ve been here in Saudi Arabia, I have a renewed faith in the cinema.” -- Dakota Johnson (Actress)
The report puts the threshold for being in the top 10% of income earners at €65.5K. I suspect many HN users would fall into this category.
Related: is there a way to estimate what the wealth inequality was like pre-industrial revolution? It occured to me that in an era of kings, queens, aristocrats, and nobles it might be similar to what we see today. Without concluding whether it is right or wrong, would it have been very different for the bottom 90% in terms of inequality? Is it just the ‘who’ that makes up the very top of the wealth and income charts that is different?
Per person or per household?
In any case this does change the conversation a bit...
It would be misleading to suggest that a single person with zero wealth has more wealth than 100k people’s wealth combined. But that’s what this headline and report are doing.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/13-million-american-household...
Using a word exactly as you should is not misleading.
People simply have a bad conception of wealth in their head.
But in reality saying that a single person just born is indeed wealthier than someone in debt: that's how it works.
There’s nothing misleading about the fact that negative net worth is worse than zero. And a person without debt factually does have far more wealth than 10 million people in debt.
Another example of your logic, any MD with a huge student debt is worse off than pretty much everyone in undeveloped world?
Or a person with a business loan but a successful business.
The much more likely situation is a person with no assets or money and some credit card debt. Indeed, a person with simply no money is better off than such a person.
If I rephrased it to a question about their thoughts how degree holders fit their model then suddenly it would be fine?
It wouldn't be misleading. You may have to explain it to somebody who has absolutely no understanding of how finance works, but that doesn't make the statement misleading.
A new born baby with zero asset and zero liability has thus a net financial worth of 0, which is obviously more than someone indebted.
Your headline could be rephrased as "Someone who has a balance of 0 is wealthier than someone $100 overdraft" and you wouldn't blink.
What are you even questioning here??
It’s not like they are using their wealth on frivolous consumption. Which means redistribution would only change who controls the investment and not the actual consumption patterns of people. Implication is that poor people will consume the same as before after redistribution with perhaps some extra assets.
So nothing materially changes other than some security. Poor people will continue to consume the same as before. Bigger problem is it’s not so clear that redistribution is necessarily a good thing because I feel the people who made money are more likely to make better decisions on their own companies.
I don’t know how companies would fare if for example Amazon were redistributed and run like some public company.
(Posting again)
1. In our current political system, wealth translates into political power, which can (and is) used to change laws to secure more wealth - just look at the portfolio performance of members of US Congress. Democracy is about putting political power in the vote.
2. Many if not most of our important problems are beyond the ability of one person (or a small group) to tackle - climate change, food security, etc. Having wealth more distributed means that more economic participants are involved in deploying it, and thus greater predictive power per dollar spent.
These sentiments are popular on Hacker News. For the readers: Consider that a few out-of-touch tech people who believe that rich people are some kind of genius, and that that is why they manage money is a circular argument.
Disclaimer: I'm a successful software engineer that wouldn't mind paying more taxes, if the rich paid their honest part.
The wealth is zero sum - you have to take away investments from Amazon etc and drive it into other places. That means Amazon will be smaller, employ fewer people and produce lesser. Why do you think that is necessarily a good thing? If you think that it is, then you can also stop the NASA program and drive all funds to poverty.
You might think this is a nitpick but this is my main argument. If you redistribute Bezos wealth to poor people, there has to be equivalent reduction somewhere else.
Is that really your train of thought?
The difference is about power. The wealth being this concentrated means the power is concentrated.
If people are okay with the idea of an ETF, or a wealth manager (or any type do fund manager/investment bank) then they should be okay with sovereign wealth funds/national ETFs that provide dividends with a guaranteed single share single vote setup.
If you want competition, then the US government used to be good at creating and sustaining artificial compétition in military procurement - similar to how Amazon let's teams compete on the same projects internally.
Because the competition would be artificially and enforced by laws, there's just as much as potential for massive efficiency gains as there is potential for corruption (the Norwegian national wealth fund has gone swimmingly for them)
I also think there are problems with having poor people have a say in how money should be invested. I think Bezos has a better say in how Amazon should run rather than random people.
1) Wealthy people account for more and more % of consumption (now about 50% in the US). Source by Federal Reserve via Bloomberg: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/capital-markets/top-10-of-earn....
2) "Investment in productive companies" now either goes to:
a) financial instruments that exist for pure wealth extraction/multiplication in form of being a landlord, private equity, REITS, etc.
c) stock market which is eaten by AI-adjacent companies which primary incentive is job displacement.
The idea that wealthy make decision beneficial to wider audience is as outdated as trickle-down economics. Both are false.
2)
a) PE is owned mostly by pension firms that the public has a huge stake in. Billionaires have stake mostly in their own companies rather than in PE firms.
b) AI investment for job displacement is necessary for overall prosperity and efficiency.
?
> Top 10% includes everyone pretty much in HN.
I would suggest you take more caution with statements like that. There are people who read this page and don't have much luck in life. And foremost, what does HN mean in the scale of society? Should HN commenters high five and carry one because the are not the bottom part of the society?
> AI investment for job displacement is necessary for overall prosperity and efficiency.
AI will boost efficiency at expanse of society. I will give you some random examples to ponder about, maybe it will touch some people hearts:
1) What will happen to hundreds of thousands of managers and office workers in the US and EU who built mortgages and families when economy recovered after COVID if AI wipes out their jobs?
2) What will happen to hundreds of thousands of people in English-speaking counties in Africa who earned they daily bread by providing remote help desk services when AI takes heir jobs?
3) What will happen to hundreds of thousand of CS grads in India whose family spent life savings to give them "good" education in Bangalore when AI takes their jobs?
These and many more changes happening rapidly all at once?
Clearly, it's a good thing that literally every US tax law passed in the last half-century has reduced taxes on the wealthy then.
I don't think anyone's asking to return to the pre-Reagan era where the top tax bracket was 90%, but rolling back some of the absurd tax cuts in the Bush and Trump eras only make sense, given how much they ratcheted up deficits while doing absolutely nothing to improve the economy.
Eventually everything from vehicles to housing will be rented to us as a way to extract the little wealth that’s left. Or layered subscription services. These aren’t great corporate ideas they are extractions of wealth.
In the absence of regulation, with these levels of inequality - democracy becomes a facade. Whatever the few oligarchs want - happens, no matter if people like it or not.
And yes, redistribution is one solution, and it does work. You just have to repeat it regularly.
There are also other solutions - like strong regulations on influencing public opinion/legislation with "lobbying", propaganda, media ownership and ethical journalism etc.
For one example - USA has neither regulation nor redistribution - so it became an oligarchy.
My post says exactly that it is zero sum - you have to take away investments in big companies and drive it into perhaps unproductive places. It’s not so clear that this is a good thing.
2. But that's irrelevant, because the reason some people are poor is not lack of resources in the whole economy. We have way more stuff than we need even if it was 0-sum
3. Also I wasn't even talking about eliminating poor people, I was talking about ensuring poor people have a say in what the society does.
>But that's irrelevant, because the reason some people are poor is not lack of resources in the whole economy. We have way more stuff than we need even if it was 0-sum
What do you think is the real problem then?
I recommend reading this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
Basically if you have the same amount of money in economy, but you double the number of transactions - economy will double too (assuming same distribution).
Money naturally accumulate. If you redistribute it - it starts moving again, and with each transaction something is produced.
That's why redistribution usually increases GDP.
But - the goal shouldn't be growing economy. The goal should be preventing oligarchy.
It also raises prices until the same amount is done. A plumber might work extra hard when he gets more work than normal, but will burn out if he continues to work like that so he raises his prices until he has to work just like before.
Which again grows the economy in real terms.
The worst thing for the economy is slave labour. The thing that forces innovation is labour shortage.
What is that effect? He just made a silly joke comment, but there is no way paying his workers more made him any money.
That isn't even wrong.
I agree with your problem assessment, but it’s been known since the Greeks that democracy inevitably ends in oligarchy. It’s why the US did not start out as a democracy as the founders knew this as well.
And if you think about it from first principles, of course it’ll end like that. Mass groups of people are easily manipulated by a smaller group. Cambridge analytica is the modern form of this but it’s happened for centuries. You say regulation, but who writes and enforces that regulation? The oligarchs.
This gets uncomfortable when you look inward and start to question “why do I have this idea in my head that democracy is an objective good thing for society”. The same oligarchs benefiting from democracy write the history books, own the media, etc. Elon musk knows exactly what he is doing and is laughing with the other billionaires at us.
You can repair and rebuild and then cities and democracy are possible. There's nothing inevitable.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099VYZXPQ
I can also dig up the quote from (Socrates I think?) a greek philosopher making the same argument thousands of years ago. Unlimited democracy ends in oligarchy. Look at how easily controlled you are - you didn’t respond to any of my points and simply said “well if everything keeps breaking we can just try again” instead of questioning why things are breaking. You’re carrying weight for billionaires for free.
Any system requires maintenance and breaks eventually. Oligarchy and dictatorship too.
A bigger problem as that fewer and fewer have any say in the direction of society now. That concentrated investment means they get to shape the world we live in. Years ago I had a more libertarian mindset about that as well. “They’re more likely to make better decisions with it because they made the money to begin with.” I no longer feel that way. It increasingly looks like the most wealthy are happy to destroy the world for everyone in their quest to become ever more elite.
Wealth is ownership, ownership is control of value. Allocating more (not all) value away from SaaS companies and into food security or education is a good thing and would make things better for everyone.
I do agree with what (I think) GP might have been trying to say though. Conspicuous spending itself is not a problem. Way rather have the ultra wealthy buying yachts that deciding to be a wealth-proportional amount of everyday commodities.
You are already doing that with your votes, the American government is already investing massive amounts into education and food security. Private investments would never do this, even poor people wouldn't invest in poor ROI endeavors, poor people invest in the same things as rich people they just invest less, so the wealth of the rich doesn't matter.
At least when they blow their money on some iberico ham a farmer somewhere keeps his livelihood. An expensive cocktail and a 200 year old distillery keeps its doors open. $100 tip on valet directly into the local economy. Live in housekeeper providing for their children.
Productivity is a cult. Why are the most “productive” things the most dehumanizing? What are the true great works of this world? Most reasonable people would say trying to help the poor, cure disease, save the environment. All things private investment has deemed insufficiently productive over some machiavellian horror.
it's a meaningless statistic.
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/thirteen-million-u...
Beyond the wealth inequality within countries, there is the wealth inequalities between countries which drives migration of people or jobs etc. Even the most closed off and isolationist country in the world - probably North Korea? - is not immune to relative wealth on the global stage.
Wealth inequality within countries again is solved elegantly within capitalism. Ignoring North Korea for now - India being poor has the advantage of labour that asks for very less wages so outsourcing is a natural strategy for companies in USA.
Beyond that imf loans and other means exist.
North Korea choosing to be isolationalist is doing it at its own peril.
Just x% | % wealth held | × poorest half
---------+---------------+----------------
20% | 80% | 4.00x
4.0% | 64% | 3.20x
0.80% | 51% | 2.56x
0.16% | 41% | 2.05x
0.032% | 33% | 1.64xSo your comment is just wrong.
The OP completely ignores this form of wealth.
- Though the bottom half of humanity may be poor, on average they have a quality of life that has risen dramatically over the past century thanks in large part to the deployment of technologies and aid originating from the wealthier nations.
- Historically the only time the trend of wealth accumulation reverses is during massive crises, wars, and civilizational collapse which make life worse for everyone and nobody with any sense would wish for.
- It seems to me a lot of people channel their unhappiness into resentment of the wealthy, based on this same flavor of folk economics as old as time "the rich get richer". And that unhappiness is usually uncoupled from their position in the economic ladder.
Yes. Which is why the question of social responsibility of the rich matters far more, because they can't help getting involved in politics. And a lot of them seem surprisingly pro-collapse, or at least pro-authoritarian. It's a common pattern in South American countries where demands for rights and equality scare the property owning class, because they might have to share a bit with the general population; this results in coups, dictators, suppression of protests etc, which results in an equally violent retaliation. You don't get Castro without Batista.
Since the general agreement that money = speech = votes, the habit of rich people buying news media to be their personal propaganda (e.g. Bezos with WaPo, the Berlusconi media empire, Murdoch etc), has also made the world a lot worse.
AI accelerates the problem, since part of the pitch is "we're going to obliterate a large amount of white collar and lower middle class work entirely, while also removing the state safety net". Not clear whether that will actually happen as promised to the shareholders, but it could be hugely disruptive.
Then there's people's more local, lived experiences with landlordism and the minor rich. A particular local example I heard recently: https://www.sheffieldtribune.co.uk/a-london-lawyer-bought-hu...
I'm more saying there's a sort of historical inevitability in the whole situation and we might benefit by taking that into consideration. And that some degree of nuance and tolerance of unfairness might play into a realistic solution.
Regarding landlordism, it's another tricky issue where yes there are bad big landlords, but the policies I've seen that put in place to tackle them tend disincentivize renting altogether and the first ones out of the market are the little guys, exasterbating the housing crisis in most cities. It seems to me an area where tolerating the bad actors is necessary to avoid crashing the whole system, to my point.
Wealth equals influence. So yes, it kinda is a measure of evil. It goes so far as Musk turning of Starlink at a critical moment to help the Russians for example. Or buying access to POTUS. Or donating money to groups to help undermine labor rights.
Basically, the type of person that can get this rich is in 99% of all cases also the type of person that doesnt give two shits about other people.
This is mostly because we’re ruled by elites that hate us. Noblesse oblige is a thing and wealth disparity is not necessarily a bad thing. What’s bad is our current elites using wealth to enrich themselves instead of planting trees (so to speak) for America.
There are humans out there who are much better than the rest of us at doing things. I’d like the subset of those that care for their people to have money and power.
The missing piece from this conversation is our current elites have made all the elements that produce good rulers taboo. The term “blood and soil” is a big no no, but it’s also the kind of cultural bond that’s needed to produce good rulers. What more noble cause is there than sacrificing for your land and people? Its been a rallying cry for all of human history.
The oligarchs that run society know exactly what kind of ideas will remove them from power and make sure these ideas are effectively banned.
If it's true that all these .001 percent of the population are indeed self-serving sociopaths, I'll eat my hat. But I just assume things are more complex than wealth = evil.
I could say with certainty that wealth magnifies the qualities and intention of whoever controls it. And we might argue nobody should have so much power. But I don't see why tremendous wealth could not also be good or neutral, and so with the accumulation of wealth.
- Sent from my iPhone
It is evil, the vast majority of people don't become rich without exploiting other people, and just about everyone in that position then leverages their wealth to exert even more power over people and politics.
> technologies and aid originating from the wealthier nations.
We run sweatshops in poor countries, exploit their people and natural resources to death, then we send them a few crumbs of aid to paint ourselves as the good guys for the history books, how noble of us!
> Historically the only time the trend of wealth accumulation reverses is during massive crises, wars, and civilizational collapse which make life worse for everyone and nobody with any sense would wish for
Nobody wishes for this but people will reach a breaking point where they're desperate and can't take it anymore. If slaves try to resist they get beaten, would you advise them to keep their heads down and do as they're told to avoid the beatings? These are classic abuser tactics.
> based on this same flavor of folk economics
Which part of "The wealthy are getting wealthier, they're using that wealth to exert more power over us, and they're using that power to change the system to be even more favourable for them, so that they can get even richer, and even more powerful, at great cost to the rest of society" would you say is "folk economics"?
Do you have any evidence to back this up? The cutoff for being in the richest 1% globally is about $1 million. What's the evil and exploitation you attribute to the average person with $1mm, who statistically is probably a retiree who had a pretty normal job?
We run sweatshops in poor countries, exploit their people and natural resources to death, then we send them a few crumbs of aid to paint ourselves as the good guys for the history books, how noble of us!
Can you name some of those countries that we've exploited over the last twenty years? Do me a favor and also look up their GDP per capita, or whatever other measure of financial well-being you prefer, and tell me how it's changed over the past two decades. I suspect what you'll find is that they've grown way, way faster than the developed countries who are "exploiting" them.
I'm not suggesting the world doesn't have problems, or that richer countries don't take advantage of poorer countries. But this "rich = evil" drivel is cartoonishly lacking in facts.
How about rich counties paying more to support the poor counties? Should we all pay 90% tax to support the billions of the third world?
2. Secondly, there is a point beyond which concentrated wealth is immoral if there are large portions of humanity living without the necessities of life (as defined by society in the current era). While I struggle where the line of morality should be drawn, I say with extreme confidence the wealth of multi-billionaires is clearly far, far on the other side of that line.
3. Lastly, extreme wealth disparity is immoral in the absence of a system that ensures everyone contributes an equal personal burden (impact upon his/her life) in the cost of government/public societal benefits. That is not the case today in the United States (or anyplace else I know of).
This is always stated like if that was an obvious fact that somehow "action is needed" against the richest, but is it?
Does it matter that a few individuals are multi-billionaires (usually because of the notional value of shares they own)? I would say that it does not. What matters is how the majority and the poorest are faring, which is orthogonal.
People that see (growing) wealth inequality as a problem rarely perceive themselves as part of it, but e.g. anyone complaining about the "top 1%" on this forum is pretty likely to be part of the "problem" themselves, globally speaking.
I think that for a lot of issues "people richer than us" are mostly a convenient scapegoat to shift the blame upstream, e.g. with CO2 emissions: If you're an average "western" citizen, then you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability, and pointing at celebrities and their private jets or somesuch is no better than thinly veiled whataboutism in my view.
Since you are talking about culpability specifically, what exactly can they do about it? Or, more to the point, what have they done so that it it is their fault?
The big problem is that this is not gonna be free. When fossils are used, it's obviously because they are the most economical option. As soon as you price in actual externalities (=> climate change), energy is going to get more expensive, and people don't like this. Almost everyone claims to be concerned about climate change, but a lot of people are neither willing to pay more for gas or power, nor do they want to risk making local industry less competitive.
The sad truth is that almost any cost for environmental sustainability/emission reduction is already too much for a lot of people.
Speaking for the US: climate sustainability (as main focus) was up for election 25 years ago, and about half the nation did not even bother voting, so it seems unsurprising to me that focus has shifted away from this issue (and fair to blame voters for that).
What if instead of comparing people in, say America to people in South Sudan, you compare people in America to people in America.
So invididual transport alone (not even counting indirect emissions from vehicle construction, road infrastructure etc.) is already significant.
What fraction of emissions would you blame on corporations alone (which corporations)?
80% of global CO2 emissions come from 57 companies.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/since-2016-80-perc...
Society has never been as rich as now, and people are getting out of misery faster and faster.
Drawing attention to the fact that some outliers have an insane amount of wealth has been shadowing the real problem: politics is in getting in the way of eradicating poverty.
Many people, mostly fueled by envy, misses that and instead focus on asking for taxing the wealthiest rather than noticing that poor people lives could be vastly improved by reducing taxation on them (rather than increasing the taxation of richer people, which is a silly take on the matter), removing economic barriers created by political forces, etc.
It matters because our political systems are influenced by the wealth. More wealth equals more political power in a system where political power is supposed to be assigned via democratic vote.
It also matters because wealth is not created in a vacuum. Elon Musk could not build his rockets unless his employees were educated by the public schoold system, and fuel trucks filling his rockets could use public roads, and 10,000 years of agriculture made it efficient for him to pay for his beef instead of having to go out and hunt an ox. Nobody owns anything but we all own everything.
It also matters because our tax systems are set up primarily to tax labour and not capital. So working people pay for the public infrastructure that wealth then sucks up.
Your privilege is showing my friend. If you were born in a favela in Brazil or on the streets in LA I guarantee you that you would not be making as much money as you are now. And when your mother dies from a preventable disease you may have a harder time dismissing wealth inequality.
That doesn't mean that society stands where it stands now because of political power. If anything, we've evolved in spite of it.
And you assuming that I was born rich is hilarious. I come from the northeast from Brazil, and my parents weren't by any means rich growing up. Now, on their 70s, they're finally financially stable after a lot of hard-work, and despite the government doing their best to destroy their wealth. And to clarify: besides attending a really good private school, my childhood was quite poor (luckily, I always had a computer about 5-10 years older than the current models back then, at least; I could've newer, but your loved statism made it harder to have access to tech).
You're full of prejudice. You think someone who isn't on the same page as you politically is privileged lol
Wealth inequality doesn't cause people to die from preventable diseases. Your commie mindset does when they can't afford to have access to wealth, medications, leisure, access to good resources, etc.
The state owns national parks, army equipment, buildings... Also, the state owns an impact on regulated companies, subsidies, etc.
Just the US army receives funding about $1 trillion a year. It must own equipment, weapons, and buildings in a value of many trillions.
Every single citizen has a share in all of what the state owns and controls. The state also partially controls the wealth of billionaires.
So I suppose, that the top 0.001% holds as much value as... the bottom 5%?
I mean that's definition of top 10% that top 10% is better than other 90%. Journalists should prove read titles before submitting
Plus there is a strong "property of how you measure wealth" effect going into this. Specifically here we are largely comparing stuff like basic items as wealth for the bottom 50% and for the top 0.01% we are measuring stocks/crypto owned * market price which is a synthetic measure and can sort of balloon arbitrarily.
It would be more interesting to see things like the inequality of true apples to apples things like vehicles, land owned, fuel used, electricity used, etc.
An interesting apples to apples one is to see how inequal views on social media are. Which have a massive concentration effect as well.
Then you could measure how much we are funneling resources and attention on different categories.
not good.
How would you call them differently? The amount of power that wealth gives them over "us" is unfathomable.
We often contemplate history with lofty detachment, thinking how far we have come as humans and societies. Kings and queens seen as ancient fictions. Sure some KPIs like life expectancy/comfort improved thanks to technologies and progress. I don't deny all that, but that's not my point. The extreme majority of humans are still vessels/subjects to an absurd minority of other humans. How can't we see that as a failure?
Most of their wealth is probably in companies operating globally. It seems more easy to tax profits in local markets. And increase competition…