Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds

> you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability

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?

As always, it takes into account only a subset of what constitutes wealth.

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 think it means they earn more cumulatively? Still a bit strange wording.

I would not care at all if 1 ppm of the world population would hold 100 times the wealth of the poorest half of the world population, if all of the poorest half would have nonetheless the means to produce their minimum necessities in energy, food, clothes etc., independently of others, so that their survival for the next months or weeks or even days would not be completely dependent on the benevolence of the rich to create places where they must be employed in order to be able to survive.

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.

Don't what? If most people had money, they'd waste it on clothes, cars and other frivolous purchases. Most billionaires made their wealth because they were effective at using that wealth for productive uses. Elon could have cashed out after PayPal, instead he revolutionized rocketry and electric vehicles. He deserves every cent of his wealth.