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

theguardian.com

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

#61

Post by CraigJPerry »

simianwords wrote: post #12

This is misleading. It counts debt as negative. This means a person who has zero wealth and zero debt will have more wealth than bottom 5% of people cumulatively (their wealth cancels out due to debt). 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.

You're arguing that accounting is misleading, your argument is that we can ignore the balance and count only the assets column. A summation of assets ignoring liabilities is not a measure of wealth.

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

#62

Post by pseudocomposer »

simianwords wrote: post #12

This is misleading. It counts debt as negative. This means a person who has zero wealth and zero debt will have more wealth than bottom 5% of people cumulatively (their wealth cancels out due to debt). 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.

It’s only “misleading” if you’re so out of touch that you don’t know a substantial portion of the population is in crippling debt.

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.

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

#63

Post by simianwords »

saikia81 wrote: post #53
simianwords wrote: post #26

Rich people having too much wealth is not necessarily that bad a thing because most of the investment is in productive companies. 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…

The fact you want to keep the current distribution, without considering that it could help many people if changed is a bit ignorant. Just because (without any indication why) you feel that the ones in control are doing well. I'm not seeing substance for these arguments when based on your feelings and presumptions. I wonder how many poor people you've really interacted with. These sentiments are popular on Hacker News…

I’m asking you very clearly how poor people’s consumption would change if you taxed the rich wealth?

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.

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

#64

Post by pseudocomposer »

simianwords wrote: post #36
mytailorisrich wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not misleading, in fact it's how accounting/balance sheets work. 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.

A headline like “new born baby has more wealth than bottom 1 million people cumulatively” is not a misleading tittle?

Unless the baby was born into more debt than those people, no. It’s a fact that the baby is wealthier than they are. A substantial portion of our population is in debt. This is a fact.

What are you even questioning here??

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

#65

Post by brap »

tock wrote: post #48

So are citizens of rich countries willing to send their wealth to poor countries? We need global wealth redistribution to fix this right?

Citizens of those same rich countries will often say with a straight face that rich people need to pay more to support the poor.

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?

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

#66

Post by fmobus »

adrian_b wrote: post #27

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…

I mean, not to discount the hard work that your grandparents would have to maintain a self-sustaining life but... it could only work out because they had land available for that. You live in a city and depend on salary because you don't own a parcel of fertile land from which you could be generating enough sustenance for yourself (estimates go from 1/10th to a full acre per person).

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

#67

Post by maciejzj »

simianwords wrote: post #26

Rich people having too much wealth is not necessarily that bad a thing because most of the investment is in productive companies. 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…

I would say that we have now enough information to say that this sentiment (characteristic for some strata of american society) is simply not true:

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.
Neither of these seem to bring any >actualThe idea that wealthy make decision beneficial to wider audience is as outdated as trickle-down economics. Both are false.

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

#68

Post by johntennessee93 »

throwaway77385 wrote: post #59
johntennessee93 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the 'ends justify the means' argument. No matter how ruthlessly power / money was accumulated by a person, the fact that they somehow did it, justifies it. It's undeniable that some progress happened thanks to Elon, but people like him can't stay in their lane and immediately assume they are demi-gods capable of doing anything. They start reshaping the world according to their psychotic beliefs and ultimately…

>No matter how ruthlessly power / money was accumulated by a person, the fact that they somehow did it, justifies it.

Elon ruthlessly created reusable rockets, satellite internet and electric cars.

>It's undeniable that some progress happened thanks to Elon, but people like him can't stay in their lane and immediately assume they are demi-gods capable of doing anything.

If Elon's ego causes him to make increasingly bad investments, capitalism will automatically assign his wealth to people who can make better use of it.

>Unchecked power is not and will never be a good thing.

Elon doesn't have unchecked power in any capacity, he follows laws like everyone else. His pay package was struck down by a judge despite the shareholders wanting it.

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

#69

Post by JimmyBuckets »

henvic wrote: post #50

Focusing on reducing economic inequality is silly. Some people being wealth doesn't mean other people must be poor. 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 env…

This comment is so out of touch with reality.

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.

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

#70

Post by thefz »

norome wrote: post #58

I think it's become popular to talk about the issue of accumulation of wealth, and make this kind of dramatic wealth comparison to point out how uneven the distribution is. I wish wealth wasn't treated so abstractly as if it's some kind of universal measure of evil. I would like to learn about some specific cases of hyper wealthy people and what they are actually up to. Seems like some very rich people do really usef…

"hey it's not so bad, the poor have showers now!"

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