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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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with power argument but let’s not assume that this will solve any material problem with the poor. Sure they will have more “power” or say in how money is invested but they are consuming as per before. I also think there are problems with having poor people have a say in how money should be invested. I think Bezos has a better say in how Amazon should run rather than random people.
What if Amazon isn't considered a "net good". Does it matter if Bezos is "better"?
I think a very problematic aspect of this is self-perception. People that see (growing) wealth inequality as a problem rarely perceive themselves as part of it, but e.g. anyone complaining about the "top 1%" on this forum is pretty likely to be part of the "problem" themselves, globally speaking. I think that for a lot of issues "people richer than us" are mostly a convenient scapegoat to shift the blame upstream, e.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ?
Vote political parties into power that put a price on emissions and honestly work on reducing it. The big problem is that this is not gonna be free. When fossils are used, it's obviously because they are the most economical option. As soon as you price in actual externalities (=> climate change), energy is going to get more expensive, and people don't like this. Almost everyone claims to be concerned about climate ch…
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…
> I wish wealth wasn't treated so abstractly as if it's some kind of universal measure of evil. Wealth equals influence. So yes, it kinda is a measure of evil. It goes so far as Musk turning of Starlink at a critical moment to help the Russians for example. Or buying access to POTUS. Or donating money to groups to help undermine labor rights. Basically, the type of person that can get this rich is in 99% of all cases…
If it's true that all these .001 percent of the population are indeed self-serving sociopaths, I'll eat my hat. But I just assume things are more complex than wealth = evil.
I could say with certainty that wealth magnifies the qualities and intention of whoever controls it. And we might argue nobody should have so much power. But I don't see why tremendous wealth could not also be good or neutral, and so with the accumulation of wealth.
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 sometimes think it's better to have (say) 1 very very rich person than 1000 rich people, just in terms of resource usage. 1000 centimilliomaires all want their own yachts and so on, whereas a centibillionaire might have one or two large yachts, not 1000 small yachts. Economies of scale!
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…
Tell me you don't worry about money without telling me you don't worry about money
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.
Using a word exactly as you should is not misleading.
People simply have a bad conception of wealth in their head.
But in reality saying that a single person just born is indeed wealthier than someone in debt: that's how it works.
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 problem is oligarchy not inefficiencies. In the absence of regulation, with these levels of inequality - democracy becomes a facade. Whatever the few oligarchs want - happens, no matter if people like it or not. And yes, redistribution is one solution, and it does work. You just have to repeat it regularly. There are also other solutions - like strong regulations on influencing public opinion/legislation with "lo…
I agree with your problem assessment, but it’s been known since the Greeks that democracy inevitably ends in oligarchy. It’s why the US did not start out as a democracy as the founders knew this as well.
And if you think about it from first principles, of course it’ll end like that. Mass groups of people are easily manipulated by a smaller group. Cambridge analytica is the modern form of this but it’s happened for centuries. You say regulation, but who writes and enforces that regulation? The oligarchs.
This gets uncomfortable when you look inward and start to question “why do I have this idea in my head that democracy is an objective good thing for society”. The same oligarchs benefiting from democracy write the history books, own the media, etc. Elon musk knows exactly what he is doing and is laughing with the other billionaires at us.