31–40 of 284 posts
This article provides paragraph after paragraph of supporting data that the richest have gotten richer, but none that I can see supporting its claim that “billions of poorer people across the world have seen their wealth standstill or decline”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rich people tend to have most of their worth in stock. In theory, assuming your stock got more expensive, you get richer without anyone in particular getting poorer.
The theory is naive, dismissive, and wrong. Stock value increases are coming from optimizations within companies that reduce employee benefits and compensation. On the consumer side of things, profits also come from taking advantage of deregulation, lowering the quality and safety of consumer products and services. Executive leadership and investors are pocketing gains made from making everyone else's lives worse. Ge…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if it did increase, most of that increase is just inflation anyway. And it's usually the wealthy that benefit from inflation (at least more than regular people do).
The wealthy absolutely do not benefit from inflation, and lose the most money due to it in reality. Inflation depreciates the value of your liquidity, which is why every major company (except apple, it seems) dumps as much currency as possible into appreciable and tax deductible assets. However, that's more difficult for persons, and most of the super wealthy end up holding a plurality of their money on their person.…
When you read stories that Apple (or whoever) has $X billion "in cash" it's not actual cash. They keep some around in money markets and the like for near term expenses, but the majority is in bonds that pay more than inflation. In fact, if Apple were classified as a bond fund they would be the largest in the world:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-04/apple-buy...
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This assumes the exchange is symmetric, and that enrichment only happens with exchanges. Neither of these are true.
It doesn’t have to be symmetric. If there is $2 consumer and $4 producer surplus, both parties benefit. And just because enrichment, as you call it, can happen other ways than exchange, does not mean it doesn’t happen via exchange too.
Curious are the ways in which a world born of binary, "carries over" and manifests the very same patterns in broader social settings, into seemingly unrelated levels of abstraction. Similarity across scales. Binary winner-take-all, all-or-nothing markets? There seem to be deeper natural forces at play; the proposed evil divide between the rich and poor just incidental symptom. Surface ripples in a powerful river.
This article provides paragraph after paragraph of supporting data that the richest have gotten richer, but none that I can see supporting its claim that “billions of poorer people across the world have seen their wealth standstill or decline”.
To be exact, it seems to be saying that the richest 500 are x% richer at the end of the year, not that the 500 richest at the beginning of the year are %x richer at the end of it. These are two different things because they are two different sets of people.
In decades past the richest and the poorest people don't remain in that part of the income distribution very long; this is especially true in the US.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes it is possible for everyone's wealth to increase. In the year 1900 Global GDP was 1 Trillion. Today it is 77 Trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product In Layman's the Global Pie is growing. The number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen DRASTICALLY over the last 25 years. https://twitter.com/humanprogress/status/913901718823489538 So the people with the smallest piece of the pie are s…
Even if it did increase, most of that increase is just inflation anyway. And it's usually the wealthy that benefit from inflation (at least more than regular people do).
This article provides paragraph after paragraph of supporting data that the richest have gotten richer, but none that I can see supporting its claim that “billions of poorer people across the world have seen their wealth standstill or decline”.
While a technically valid criticism, is it really that controversial? Costs are increasing faster than wages at low income levels - which is easy when wages are largely stagnant or declining due to increased competition driven by labor surplus and automation.
Of course, this doesn't mean that everyone is better; there are always winners and some losers, and there are setbacks here and there, but the big picture is one of great progress.
For more, one should read the Human Development Reports:
http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2016_human_developme...
This article provides paragraph after paragraph of supporting data that the richest have gotten richer, but none that I can see supporting its claim that “billions of poorer people across the world have seen their wealth standstill or decline”.
The richest have gotten richer To be exact, it seems to be saying that the richest 500 are x% richer at the end of the year, not that the 500 richest at the beginning of the year are %x richer at the end of it. These are two different things because they are two different sets of people. In decades past the richest and the poorest people don't remain in that part of the income distribution very long; this is especial…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rich people tend to have most of their worth in stock. In theory, assuming your stock got more expensive, you get richer without anyone in particular getting poorer.
The theory is naive, dismissive, and wrong. Stock value increases are coming from optimizations within companies that reduce employee benefits and compensation. On the consumer side of things, profits also come from taking advantage of deregulation, lowering the quality and safety of consumer products and services. Executive leadership and investors are pocketing gains made from making everyone else's lives worse. Ge…
This theory is naive, dismissive, and wrong. You have accurately seen some bad examples, and it has led you to incorrectly conclude that the bad examples are the bulk of what is going on.