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Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030

theguardian.com

51–60 of 368 posts

Re: Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030

#51
Someone else on HN commented that the poor need to stop reproducing in order to improve equality. At first I found the comment kind of troubling, but the more I think about it the more it seems to make sense.

Watching this video kind of backs up the point to a degree, even though the topic is immigration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE

Can someone come back with a decent counterargument? I haven't been able to yet.

(It's worth remembering that a good percentage of people reading this will be in the top 1% despite not being "rich" by western standards).

Re: Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030

#52
post #15

Communism went away. It's not that communism was better. It's that it was competition. There was, for half a century, a competitive threat - do better than the USSR, or face a revolution. That threat was taken quite seriously in the US for decades. Industrialists (the US economy was mostly manufacturing back then) were careful not to get too greedy or power-hungry. They feared expropriation. Britain nationalized many…

Capitalism is so ingrained now, nobody can even imagine that alternative system could exist. In the minds of most, communism is a synonym of authoritarianism. Communist governments tended to be authoritarian, but it's not clear to me if it's a natural consequence of communism. It's more likely that authoritarianism is a consequence of violent revolutions. Is it possible to combine communism with democracy?

The future AI systems at the head of the major multinationals will surely be creative in coming up with a new method of global resource allocation..

Re: Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030

#55
In the US, a large part of this trend is due to the tax code. Examples: 1) in real estate, a "1031 transfer" allows the tax payer to not pay tax on the gain from the sale of property so long as they purchase another piece of real estate. 2) Capital Gains tax rates are lower than Ordinary Income tax rates. So, the tax you pay on income derived from wealth is lower than the tax rate you pay on income derived from employment.

Re: Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030

#56
post #51

Someone else on HN commented that the poor need to stop reproducing in order to improve equality. At first I found the comment kind of troubling, but the more I think about it the more it seems to make sense. Watching this video kind of backs up the point to a degree, even though the topic is immigration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE Can someone come back with a decent counterargument? I haven't been a…

Maybe read an introduction to eugenics?

Re: Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030

#57
post #11
post #2

So when do we get trickled down on exactly?

Trickle-down theory is accurate! It's just not necessarily money that's raining down on our heads. Less snarkily: Piketty observes that reinvested capital accumulates at a faster rate than labour. Also, we have no global taxation system, so capital flows through the cracks into regimes with the lowest tax rate -- meanwhile, labour is pinned down by strict laws restricting immigration, and mostly can't go where wages…

How would you fix it? It looks like a structural/technological issue: less people needed to produce the same/more amount of value. Whereas previously you needed thousands of workers, now you can have a craigslist make hundreds of millions of dollars with 19 workers (they had the record at one point for most money per employee).

Labour is just less valuable now, and the system will need to change - not that it broke.

Re: Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030

#58
Top 1% of composers are most of all classical music played ( probably over two-thirds ). Of their music, maybe 1% of their songs are the ones that get most of that playing.

Celestial bodies also have exponential inequality. Get a little mass, get more gravity, get more mass. Inequality is within nature itself.

Actors in hollywood. They release one movie, now they get 50 offers for other movies. They quickly get more than 2/3 of the opportunities, relative to an unknown. Inequality will always exist because trust exists, and if you trust someone, you will want to work with them.

Capitalism is great, because even if you're an unknown, you can do a good job(at whatever field you want), and get more opportunities, and do more good jobs, and get exponentially more opportunities.

Re: Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030

#59

It is said the Chinese plan out 100 and 1000 years. Why not continue the extrapolation past 2050 and 2100, it might provide sound bites with more teeth "One person to control 99% of wealth by date 20XX".

Yup I am sure China planned to be up to their eyeballs in debt, their money flooding out to Canada and Australia, and cultural revolution 2.0 underway.

Yup, all planned out

Re: Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030

#60
Steven Pinker's new book, Enlightenment Now, has a pretty compelling section on wealth/income inequality. The basic position - and I think the data supports this - is that it really doesn't matter what the top 1% are doing so long as the bottom half are seeing improved living conditions.

Furthermore, wealth isn't a static I win/you lose proposition - much of that wealth has been created in recent history. People spend less as a percentage of income on food and housing, have better access to healthcare, and more leisure time than ever before. It's a remarkable story.

Over a billion people have been lifted out of poverty over the last 30 years thanks to globalization. I think that's much more important than how much money Warren Buffett or Bill Gates have.

Income/wealth inequality has been the state of humanity for all of recorded history, and it seems unlikely to go away any time soon - it's trivially easy to show how wealth accumulation occurs using game theory even if trade is relatively fair. The only events that seem to reliably reset the balance are global wars, huge famines, or natural disasters.

I think it's a natural human inclination to fixate on the rich and to demonize them, and perhaps some are deserving of such demonization, but it doesn't seem to be a terribly useful way to think about improving the human condition. It just spurs on class resentment which is, if history is any guide, just about the worst way to go about things possible.

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