This is better explained by the amount of impoverished people in the world.
I thought poverty was down! I would rather fight inequality by eliminating poverty. Tax the robots and redistribute wealth to social safety nets!
Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity
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Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity
#12> The eight individuals named in the report are [Microsoft's Bill] Gates, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, veteran investor Warren Buffett, Mexico's Carlos Slim, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. With the exception of Ortega, Buffett and Slim, that's a lot of wealth concentrated in tech. Hmm...
Bezos is borderline retail
Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity
#13It's amazing how little they actually have to spend to make people think they are philanthropic, and not just greedy assholes.
Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity
#14> The eight individuals named in the report are [Microsoft's Bill] Gates, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, veteran investor Warren Buffett, Mexico's Carlos Slim, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. With the exception of Ortega, Buffett and Slim, that's a lot of wealth concentrated in tech. Hmm...
> With the exception of Ortega, Buffett and Slim, that's a lot of wealth concentrated in tech. Hmm...
How is this surprising?
Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity
#15This is an incredibly misleading statistic because they use NET wealth, which means that they subtract your debt from your wealth. That means that if you have more debt than wealth (not necessarily a bad thing), you have negative wealth. This is the case for roughly 40% of the world's population.
This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than the poorest 2.85 billion people in the world. It's also the same metric Donald Trump used in that story his daughter liked to tell, about him walking past a homeless person and saying "that guy is 700 million dollars richer than me".
Income and wealth inequality is a huge problem, but stats like these are incredibly misleading and shouldn't be used to make the argument.
Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity
#16These measures I don't think are a good way to measure, because I think there's a difference between someone who's very wealthy on paper because of high stock prices, and someone whose's wealth because they got a disproportionate share of income. The latter represents money diverted in the here and now to someone else, and the former represents money that can be diverted in the future. Of course, you can ask Elizabeth Holmes how much of a billionaire she is now with Theranos, as an example of how paper wealth doesn't always translate.
It's possible for someone to be very IPO stock rich, but not actually have received much income. This is especially true for founders who started with their stock, instead of being given it as a bonus.
Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity
#17note that half of that lot have given pretty much all their wealth to charity. There is an argument that their ability to deploy that wealth to good effect is far greater than that of the american govt? In away - its a very positive message
The alternative would have been to tax them more and use the tax results to help people. Let's compare:
Taxes:
- Predictable income
- Democratic control over the spending
- Big risk of misuse due to lobbying
- No predictability, depends on the whim of those who could spend
- No democratic control
- Small risk of misuse due to lobbying
Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity
#18Isn't it more important to look at how the absolute wealth of the poorest, than the relative wealth?
If poverty if viewed as a lack of resources for certain individuals, then understanding the allocation and distribution of resourced over all of humanity is relevant as a means to understand the problem.
Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity
#19[deleted]
Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity
#20What if those 8 people spent all of their wealth buying goods and services from those poor people?
To spend all of that wealth, every fish would have to be caught, every forest mowed down, every drop of oil burned, to have enough natural resources to spend all of that money.
I'm sure I'm wrong and others will correct me, but I still can't help but feel it's in some ways good that the wealth is so concentrated it can never be fully spent.