Re: "No single human needs or deserves this much wealth."
Thanks for your opinion. That's all it is. There's no validity to that position. Wealth is not based on need or "deserving". In Jeff's case it's based on smart business, hard work and accomplishment. What have you accomplished?
Wealth Shown to Scale
51–60 of 147 posts
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#52I'm learning economic concepts so some of my notions and questions end up being naive. Would appreciate if someone could clarify/answer this. It's a fair guess that vast majority of Bezos's wealth is in Amazon equities. Which are valued as such by the participants in US equity market. A thought exercise, what would happen if he were to liquidate all of that $180+B in equities? Safe to say he will get less than $180B…
There's a pretty big difference between owning $180bn and owning Amazon. At this scale he's more like the monarch of Amazonland than the owner of Bob's Dry-cleaning. I'm not sure that implies there should be a regime change in Amazonland, though. In some ways it implies the opposite. Annex Amazonland, overthrow King Bezos, and you're faced with the challenge of administering the damn thing yourself.
Bezos has already stoped administering Amazonland. The king has found ambitious lackeys to do that work.
Why don’t we overthrow the king, then reward those that remain to keep the whole thing going.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#53xkcd's "Money" graphic gives a sense of other value comparisons, in a somewhat logarithmic sense, ranging from $1 to the roughly $2.4 quadrillion dollars of all human economic activity to date (as of 2012 when the infographic was made). https://xkcd.com/980/
Genuinely curious question. How do you guys pull xkcd comics just like that? Do You save interesting comics for future use or do you remember the comic and google it to find it?
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#54I'm learning economic concepts so some of my notions and questions end up being naive. Would appreciate if someone could clarify/answer this. It's a fair guess that vast majority of Bezos's wealth is in Amazon equities. Which are valued as such by the participants in US equity market. A thought exercise, what would happen if he were to liquidate all of that $180+B in equities? Safe to say he will get less than $180B…
> So it seems to me that not all of his wealth is usable
Bezos is the richest, so we don't have examples quite at that scale. That said, we have some pretty big (eg gates, buffet) announcing liquidation & donation without anything bad happening. So, he probably could sell his amazon shares and do something else with them.
You are approaching some "it's complicated" questions that occur at scale though. It's true, for example, that if Bezos wanted to liquidate immediately, that volume of shares is probably more than the market could buy. It might temporarily crash the stock, if handled wrong. Finance people know how to do this right though, so I think we can say that all of that wealth is usable.
There's also the other side, what Bezos would spend that wealth on? You can only buy what exists. Say Bezos decides to solve homelessness and housing scarcity in his state forever. He sells his amazon shares (slowly, carefully) and buys half a million houses. There aren't that many houses for sale, so rices would skyrocket. Say he decides to build instead, to avoid that. The state only has so many builders, roofers, cement shops, cranes... only so much capacity to produce houses. Building or buying half a million houses in Washington quickly is probably near impossible. You might cause detrimental side effects by trying. Normal people couldn't buy a homes, because Bezos has bid up the price of everything. OTOH, builders and pre existing property investors will get rich. Inflation probably happens.
This is the kind of problem governments often face. At some scale, common sense economic concepts/abstractions like the cost of building a house break down and underlying realities leak in. Only so many houses exist.There's only so much labour, materials, capacity to produce.
A rung or two higher up the meta ladder, a common demonstration of macroeconomic weirdness is the "paradox of choice." What would happen to an economy if everyone saves 100% of their money? All shops & restaurants are empty. There's no work. Businesses fail, default on loans. Share prices crash. It's simply impossible for a whole economy to save. Saving (and more controversially, borrowing) doesn't exist at macroeconomic scale. An economy can't save or borrow. Shutting down car factories today doesn't make it produce more cars tomorrow. So, we can't all save for a car this year to buy one next year.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would certainly help if the ultra wealthy and global corporations would just pay their fair share rather than use possible combination of barely-legal structures to avoid being taxed, bribe officials to create special exemptions, offload money to tax heavens and scare-monger about losing jobs whenever an actual tax increase is due. The USA cannot even properly finance the IRS to go after the super wealthy tax chea…
the powerful write the rules. always has been the case. do you know of any societies that managed to sustain a dynamic where that's not the case? I literally cannot think of any at all. Just some very brief temporary aberrations.
Saying “the powerful write the rules” is pretty much tautological.
Of course the powerful write the rules. Most people access an individuals power based on their ability to make and break rules.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#56The rich aren't the enemy, rent-seekers are. They may overlap, and Bezos may be both, but wealth and capital on their own are orthogonal to justice. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EHKZRLcW4AA1aju?format=jpg&name=...
Rent-seeking might not be the only problem. Worker exploitation is also a serious issue on my list. How on earth can someone defend not paying a living salary for a full time job? Add to that that the legal framework (talking about the USA) is seriously skewed to favor employers and disadvantages workers and any attempts to unionize. This has to stop.
> How on earth can someone defend not paying a living salary for a full time job?
Putting the employer on the hook for more aspects of the employee's well-being (healthcare, living wage) only increases the gap between employed and unemployed, therefore increasing the bargaining power of employers. I think it's better to have society provide a basic standard of living (most importantly housing and healthcare) to all poor people, employed or not.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#57> No single human needs or deserves this much wealth. Why not?
Yes. That was a rather arrogant stab of jealousy. Big piles of concentrated wealth sometimes gets spent on important projects that governments (ie. normal people) won't or can't do.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#58I disagree on the the thrust of the argument - that people (including comparatively wealthy individuals like doctors and lawyers) oppose changes to tackle wealth inequality because they don’t understand the gulf of wealth between them and the ultra rich. In my experience it has nothing to do with that - rather these people know that they will ultimately end up as the main target for any such law, not these billionair…
Absolutely. It reminds me of way back when the NDP (left-wing party in Canada) was asked "who is rich?" and the answer was "a family of 4 making more than $60k per year". That honesty did not go over well at all, but it's the truth. There aren't that many ultra-wealthy. To raise real money, the definition of rich pretty quickly drops to the top 10-25% of income earners and suddenly some dude making $80k per year is being told he's rich.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#59I'm learning economic concepts so some of my notions and questions end up being naive. Would appreciate if someone could clarify/answer this. It's a fair guess that vast majority of Bezos's wealth is in Amazon equities. Which are valued as such by the participants in US equity market. A thought exercise, what would happen if he were to liquidate all of that $180+B in equities? Safe to say he will get less than $180B…
You are focusing on numbers which will lead you nowhere. The reason the US has a struggling population is that the US has a population that didn't have a good education and training. If you want to make a population richer, you need to train people to do things (ie: Plumbing, installing an Air Conditioner, becoming an ophthalmologist, etc...). As evidenced by the latest stimulus checks, giving people money will only create inflation and a shortage of low-wage workers. The US is very rich and connected, so lack of raw resources is not one of its issues.
Jeff Bezos can have $200bn+ in the bank without affecting the economy. The effect of seizing these $200bn and distributing them is the same as quantitatively easing them into the economy. Some people exert power through work or politics. Some people have none and want to exert power through "journalism" and "shaping opinions". It's all fun and games until these people are elected (through populism probably coupled by a recession); which is when you need to prepare your luggage and get the hell out of such a place.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#60I disagree on the the thrust of the argument - that people (including comparatively wealthy individuals like doctors and lawyers) oppose changes to tackle wealth inequality because they don’t understand the gulf of wealth between them and the ultra rich. In my experience it has nothing to do with that - rather these people know that they will ultimately end up as the main target for any such law, not these billionair…
> Time and time again the wealth of the middle classes ends up as collateral damage in attempts to tax the very top.
What are examples of this happening?