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.
I would agree here if our political systems weren't vulnerable to capture by wealth. Inequality drives more inequality, it has to be counterbalanced by laws.
The majority of human civilisation has been feudal. We recently got democracy for everyone. We are not yet out of reach of our local civilisational attractor.
This, "If you have enough, why does it matter if someone else has more" argument doesn't really hold. Yes we can make more TVs and phones so that everyone can get one, but then get to things like centrally located housing, where there is a limited supply. It matters a lot if you want someplace to live, and there are thousands of very rich people trying to out bid one and other for the same space in your city. This is why housing is no longer affordable.
not that I disagree with you in principle but it is a bad example. there are a lot more places where rich do not want to live than places where they do so rich outbidding you for housing wouldn't make even a top-100 list of issues. the "If you have enough, why does it matter if someone else has more" is basically "rich get to live in Monaco, you get to live in Elmo, Kansas" with all your needs met
A good location means more opportunities. Someone located in the center of a large expensive city will have a lot more opportunities to make money and meet people who have influence than someone in Elmo. A business set up in Elmo will not make as much money as a business set up in Monaco. This means that the best opportunities are reserved for people who need them the least.
I don't think it's self-sufficiency that should be the goal for society here, but self-sufficiency is one of several means to achieve the goal.
I think the goal should be for everybody to have the ability to walk away from an abusive boss, landlord or spouse without jeopardizing their life essentials. Which is a stronger statement than just saying that everybody should be able to afford their life essentials.
Not having a boss or landlord is a great way of achieving this, but it's not the only way. (If you don't have a boss, you do need the freedom to turn away abusive clients or customers)
Another way is ensuring that the essentials are universally available. Universal health care, public housing and a SNAP program that's not itself abusive is another.
Another HN-popular mechanism is UBI.
Another mechanism that helps greatly is ensuring that the essentials are inexpensive. Clothing and food have become cheap, but healthcare and housing have more than absorbed the difference.
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).
Wealth translates easily into political power and influence. Do we care if Saudi Royalty and billionaires have power to shape societies, use power over us, determine what media we consume etc. Most of the history the rich and powerful ruled over us, why we can't go on living like that.
Kushner, Saudi, Ellisons behind Paramount, Warner, X, ... is nothing to fear of.
“There’s so much I’m learning from being here, In the States it feels really grim; and even in the less than 24 hours that I’ve been here in Saudi Arabia, I have a renewed faith in the cinema.” -- Dakota Johnson (Actress)
FTA: The authoritative World Inequality Report 2026, based on data compiled by 200 researchers, also found that the top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90% combined, while the poorest half captures less than 10% of total global earnings.
The report puts the threshold for being in the top 10% of income earners at €65.5K. I suspect many HN users would fall into this category.
Related: is there a way to estimate what the wealth inequality was like pre-industrial revolution? It occured to me that in an era of kings, queens, aristocrats, and nobles it might be similar to what we see today. Without concluding whether it is right or wrong, would it have been very different for the bottom 90% in terms of inequality? Is it just the ‘who’ that makes up the very top of the wealth and income charts that is different?
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 even more than the bottom 5% if you only look at the US. 13 million or 10.4% of US households have negative net worth according to [1]. I've seen articles claiming that the bottom 15-25% of US Americans have negative net worth. So I am richer than all these households combined. Technically true, but completely misleading.
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.
Real estate, automobiles, credentials/degrees, and businesses are all assets that would counterbalance their debt. (Credentials and degrees are not liquid, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that a doctor's license isn't worth many dollars).
The much more likely situation is a person with no assets or money and some credit card debt. Indeed, a person with simply no money is better off than such a person.
How else to do it? Don't count debt at all and pretend that if you've borrowed money, you're rich? Calculate EV of that debt - but how and on what timeframe?
Counting debt makes the poorest person in the world being richer than the poorest 1% combined. That is ridiculous to say, because we intuitively don't read that with negative wealth in mind so you create these very misleading headlines.
Let’s first agree that it’s misleading. A new born baby has more wealth than bottom 1 million peoples wealth cumulatively according to this metric. That’s ridiculous.
>It would be misleading to suggest that a single person with zero wealth has more wealth than 100k people’s wealth combined.
It wouldn't be misleading. You may have to explain it to somebody who has absolutely no understanding of how finance works, but that doesn't make the statement misleading.
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.
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.
I did some quick math: the top .001% consumes as much as bottom 3% of Americans cumulatively. It’s high but it gives an accurate picture of how bad the real problem is.
When you say "Americans" do you mean people in the USA? Or the continents?
Beyond the wealth inequality within countries, there is the wealth inequalities between countries which drives migration of people or jobs etc. Even the most closed off and isolationist country in the world - probably North Korea? - is not immune to relative wealth on the global stage.
Wealth inequality within countries again is solved elegantly within capitalism. Ignoring North Korea for now - India being poor has the advantage of labour that asks for very less wages so outsourcing is a natural strategy for companies in USA.
Beyond that imf loans and other means exist.
North Korea choosing to be isolationalist is doing it at its own peril.
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 some extra assets.
So nothing materially changes other than some security. Poor people will continue to consume the same as before.
Bigger problem is it’s not so clear that redistribution is necessarily a good thing because I feel the people who made money are more likely to make better decisions on their own companies.
I don’t know how companies would fare if for example Amazon were redistributed and run like some public company.
There are a couple of nuanced issues with what you are saying.
1. In our current political system, wealth translates into political power, which can (and is) used to change laws to secure more wealth - just look at the portfolio performance of members of US Congress. Democracy is about putting political power in the vote.
2. Many if not most of our important problems are beyond the ability of one person (or a small group) to tackle - climate change, food security, etc. Having wealth more distributed means that more economic participants are involved in deploying it, and thus greater predictive power per dollar spent.
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 >actual< benefit to the society in terms of living standards, health, food quality, personal independence, psychological well-being, stability, etc.
The idea that wealthy make decision beneficial to wider audience is as outdated as trickle-down economics. Both are false.
1) you are damn right that top 10% consume as much as bottom 50 or whatever. Let’s be clear that taxing this bunch of people even more will have disastrous consequences. I’m okay with it if it works out. Top 10% includes everyone pretty much in HN.
2)
a) PE is owned mostly by pension firms that the public has a huge stake in. Billionaires have stake mostly in their own companies rather than in PE firms.
b) AI investment for job displacement is necessary for overall prosperity and efficiency.
> Let’s be clear that taxing this bunch of people even more will have disastrous consequences.
Clearly, it's a good thing that literally every US tax law passed in the last half-century has reduced taxes on the wealthy then.
I don't think anyone's asking to return to the pre-Reagan era where the top tax bracket was 90%, but rolling back some of the absurd tax cuts in the Bush and Trump eras only make sense, given how much they ratcheted up deficits while doing absolutely nothing to improve the economy.
> Let’s be clear that taxing this bunch of people even more will have disastrous consequences.
?
> Top 10% includes everyone pretty much in HN.
I would suggest you take more caution with statements like that. There are people who read this page and don't have much luck in life. And foremost, what does HN mean in the scale of society? Should HN commenters high five and carry one because the are not the bottom part of the society?
> AI investment for job displacement is necessary for overall prosperity and efficiency.
AI will boost efficiency at expanse of society. I will give you some random examples to ponder about, maybe it will touch some people hearts:
1) What will happen to hundreds of thousands of managers and office workers in the US and EU who built mortgages and families when economy recovered after COVID if AI wipes out their jobs?
2) What will happen to hundreds of thousands of people in English-speaking counties in Africa who earned they daily bread by providing remote help desk services when AI takes heir jobs?
3) What will happen to hundreds of thousand of CS grads in India whose family spent life savings to give them "good" education in Bangalore when AI takes their jobs?
These and many more changes happening rapidly all at once?
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. For the readers: Consider that a few out-of-touch tech people who believe that rich people are some kind of genius, and that that is why they manage money is a circular argument.
Disclaimer: I'm a successful software engineer that wouldn't mind paying more taxes, if the rich paid their honest part.
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.
You're eliding the distinction between people and businesses. There's no reason Amazon the company would have to be smaller simply because the Bezos fortune was distributed among more people. It didn't get 50% smaller or employ 50% fewer people when he got divorced and had to split the marital property.
Fair point. Let’s take McKinsey and her woke charities. She sold Amazon shares and drove it into the charities. The charities are now consuming more. So there has to be equal decrease somewhere else right? People are consuming equally less somewhere else to allow for extra activity in charities.
You might think this is a nitpick but this is my main argument. If you redistribute Bezos wealth to poor people, there has to be equivalent reduction somewhere else.
No one is saying the rich shouldn’t exist. But there is a point where so much accumulated wealth is counter productive. The fact trillionaires will exist is mind boggling.
Eventually everything from vehicles to housing will be rented to us as a way to extract the little wealth that’s left. Or layered subscription services. These aren’t great corporate ideas they are extractions of wealth.
I see this argument often but for me it misses something.
The difference is about power. The wealth being this concentrated means the power is concentrated.
If people are okay with the idea of an ETF, or a wealth manager (or any type do fund manager/investment bank) then they should be okay with sovereign wealth funds/national ETFs that provide dividends with a guaranteed single share single vote setup.
If you want competition, then the US government used to be good at creating and sustaining artificial compétition in military procurement - similar to how Amazon let's teams compete on the same projects internally.
Because the competition would be artificially and enforced by laws, there's just as much as potential for massive efficiency gains as there is potential for corruption (the Norwegian national wealth fund has gone swimmingly for them)
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.
The concentration of wealth isn’t a problem so much for poverty, because without doing something to increase the production of things people need, having more money would just result in higher prices. Like you said, the 0.001% aren’t consuming half the world’s food production, so redistributing there money alone would not solve world hunger.
A bigger problem as that fewer and fewer have any say in the direction of society now. That concentrated investment means they get to shape the world we live in. Years ago I had a more libertarian mindset about that as well. “They’re more likely to make better decisions with it because they made the money to begin with.” I no longer feel that way. It increasingly looks like the most wealthy are happy to destroy the world for everyone in their quest to become ever more elite.
I agree with your overall position but I disagree on the first point.
Wealth is ownership, ownership is control of value. Allocating more (not all) value away from SaaS companies and into food security or education is a good thing and would make things better for everyone.
> Allocating more (not all) value away from SaaS companies and into food security or education is a good thing and would make things better for everyone.
You are already doing that with your votes, the American government is already investing massive amounts into education and food security. Private investments would never do this, even poor people wouldn't invest in poor ROI endeavors, poor people invest in the same things as rich people they just invest less, so the wealth of the rich doesn't matter.
I agree with that. I only mean that it’s not as simple as “if we gave everyone Elon’s money then we could all afford homes.” But you’re right, the higher concentration of wealth means there’s less investment into producing more resources that people need, so indirectly it does mean there are less homes to go around.
I do agree with what (I think) GP might have been trying to say though. Conspicuous spending itself is not a problem. Way rather have the ultra wealthy buying yachts that deciding to be a wealth-proportional amount of everyday commodities.
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!
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 "lobbying", propaganda, media ownership and ethical journalism etc.
For one example - USA has neither regulation nor redistribution - so it became an oligarchy.
How does redistribution solve material problems with the poor?
My post says exactly that it is zero sum - you have to take away investments in big companies and drive it into perhaps unproductive places. It’s not so clear that this is a good thing.
1. It isn't 0-sum (see the effect of Henry Ford paying his workers more for 1 obvious example).
2. But that's irrelevant, because the reason some people are poor is not lack of resources in the whole economy. We have way more stuff than we need even if it was 0-sum
3. Also I wasn't even talking about eliminating poor people, I was talking about ensuring poor people have a say in what the society does.
It is zero sum unless you can prove that redistribution will increase productivity. If you can prove it then it is an obvious thing to do. It actually isn't that obvious otherwise we would see more productivity from western Europe.
>But that's irrelevant, because the reason some people are poor is not lack of resources in the whole economy. We have way more stuff than we need even if it was 0-sum
Redistribution doesn't need to increase productivity, it suffices that it increases consumption for the economy to grow, if that's your only goal (it isn't the main goal for me).
Basically if you have the same amount of money in economy, but you double the number of transactions - economy will double too (assuming same distribution).
Money naturally accumulate. If you redistribute it - it starts moving again, and with each transaction something is produced.
That's why redistribution usually increases GDP.
But - the goal shouldn't be growing economy. The goal should be preventing oligarchy.
> That's why redistribution usually increases GDP.
It also raises prices until the same amount is done. A plumber might work extra hard when he gets more work than normal, but will burn out if he continues to work like that so he raises his prices until he has to work just like before.
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.
No, my reasoning is small groups can easily control large ones. There are tons of books on the failures of democracy throughout history. Here’s one from obamas summer reading list:
I can also dig up the quote from (Socrates I think?) a greek philosopher making the same argument thousands of years ago. Unlimited democracy ends in oligarchy. Look at how easily controlled you are - you didn’t respond to any of my points and simply said “well if everything keeps breaking we can just try again” instead of questioning why things are breaking. You’re carrying weight for billionaires for free.
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 useful things with their money. Couple other thoughts that hang around my head:
- Though the bottom half of humanity may be poor, on average they have a quality of life that has risen dramatically over the past century thanks in large part to the deployment of technologies and aid originating from the wealthier nations.
- Historically the only time the trend of wealth accumulation reverses is during massive crises, wars, and civilizational collapse which make life worse for everyone and nobody with any sense would wish for.
- It seems to me a lot of people channel their unhappiness into resentment of the wealthy, based on this same flavor of folk economics as old as time "the rich get richer". And that unhappiness is usually uncoupled from their position in the economic ladder.
> I wish wealth wasn't treated so abstractly as if it's some kind of universal measure of evil.
It is evil, the vast majority of people don't become rich without exploiting other people, and just about everyone in that position then leverages their wealth to exert even more power over people and politics.
> technologies and aid originating from the wealthier nations.
We run sweatshops in poor countries, exploit their people and natural resources to death, then we send them a few crumbs of aid to paint ourselves as the good guys for the history books, how noble of us!
> Historically the only time the trend of wealth accumulation reverses is during massive crises, wars, and civilizational collapse which make life worse for everyone and nobody with any sense would wish for
Nobody wishes for this but people will reach a breaking point where they're desperate and can't take it anymore. If slaves try to resist they get beaten, would you advise them to keep their heads down and do as they're told to avoid the beatings? These are classic abuser tactics.
> based on this same flavor of folk economics
Which part of "The wealthy are getting wealthier, they're using that wealth to exert more power over us, and they're using that power to change the system to be even more favourable for them, so that they can get even richer, and even more powerful, at great cost to the rest of society" would you say is "folk economics"?
> Historically the only time the trend of wealth accumulation reverses is during massive crises, wars, and civilizational collapse which make life worse for everyone and nobody with any sense would wish for.
Yes. Which is why the question of social responsibility of the rich matters far more, because they can't help getting involved in politics. And a lot of them seem surprisingly pro-collapse, or at least pro-authoritarian. It's a common pattern in South American countries where demands for rights and equality scare the property owning class, because they might have to share a bit with the general population; this results in coups, dictators, suppression of protests etc, which results in an equally violent retaliation. You don't get Castro without Batista.
Since the general agreement that money = speech = votes, the habit of rich people buying news media to be their personal propaganda (e.g. Bezos with WaPo, the Berlusconi media empire, Murdoch etc), has also made the world a lot worse.
AI accelerates the problem, since part of the pitch is "we're going to obliterate a large amount of white collar and lower middle class work entirely, while also removing the state safety net". Not clear whether that will actually happen as promised to the shareholders, but it could be hugely disruptive.
The power of wealth certainly comes with a lot of responsibility. Which is why I would be curious to have a more detailed view on what all these hyper-rich people are actually doing with their money, and how they came to be so wealthy. We have some obvious examples of power accumulation and evil, and some clear examples of doing great good in the form of philanthropy. So while It doesn't make sense to me that so few individuals should have so much money and power, I still don't think we should count them all as defacto evil.
I'm more saying there's a sort of historical inevitability in the whole situation and we might benefit by taking that into consideration. And that some degree of nuance and tolerance of unfairness might play into a realistic solution.
Regarding landlordism, it's another tricky issue where yes there are bad big landlords, but the policies I've seen that put in place to tackle them tend disincentivize renting altogether and the first ones out of the market are the little guys, exasterbating the housing crisis in most cities. It seems to me an area where tolerating the bad actors is necessary to avoid crashing the whole system, to my point.
Well, the poor seem to have smartphones as well XD — Uganda for example has 54% smartphone ownership. But in terms of vaccination rates, education, access to clean water, access to electricity yes things are ever improving if we look at statistics on global wellbeing. "In 1981, 44% of the global population lived in extreme poverty. By 2019, that figure had dropped to just 9%." So inequality may be huge today, but it doesn't mean the bottom hasn't also risen dramatically.
About my own money, I worry. About other people's money, I rather try to think carefully. "Worrying" about money is the emotional basis that fuels a lot of populist rhetoric. And It seems to me economics is often counterintuitive to our emotional intuition of how things should be.
> 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 also the type of person that doesnt give two shits about other people.
> Basically, the type of person that can get this rich is in 99% of all cases also the type of person that doesnt give two shits about other people.
This is mostly because we’re ruled by elites that hate us. Noblesse oblige is a thing and wealth disparity is not necessarily a bad thing. What’s bad is our current elites using wealth to enrich themselves instead of planting trees (so to speak) for America.
There are humans out there who are much better than the rest of us at doing things. I’d like the subset of those that care for their people to have money and power.
The missing piece from this conversation is our current elites have made all the elements that produce good rulers taboo. The term “blood and soil” is a big no no, but it’s also the kind of cultural bond that’s needed to produce good rulers. What more noble cause is there than sacrificing for your land and people? Its been a rallying cry for all of human history.
The oligarchs that run society know exactly what kind of ideas will remove them from power and make sure these ideas are effectively banned.
I don't see why influence is evil per se. Gates did a lot with his fortune that seems unambiguously good. Musk also seems to have done at least some good in terms of sustainability tech. Doesn't mean there isn't lots of bad as well, but I don't see that wealth itself is a measure of evil.
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.
I think also we cannot measure wealth in GDP or even by salary. Someone who earns $2k e.g. in vietnam and lives in Danang will have better quality of life than someone who earns $4k and lives in SF.
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 envy, misses that and instead focus on asking for taxing the wealthiest rather than noticing that poor people lives could be vastly improved by reducing taxation on them (rather than increasing the taxation of richer people, which is a silly take on the matter), removing economic barriers created by political forces, etc.
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.
How would you call them differently? The amount of power that wealth gives them over "us" is unfathomable.
We often contemplate history with lofty detachment, thinking how far we have come as humans and societies. Kings and queens seen as ancient fictions. Sure some KPIs like life expectancy/comfort improved thanks to technologies and progress. I don't deny all that, but that's not my point. The extreme majority of humans are still vessels/subjects to an absurd minority of other humans. How can't we see that as a failure?
The main asset most people have is their ability to do useful work for some employer. So for example, if a person has demonstrated a history of steady employment, some bank or finance firm would probably be willing to loan the person the money to buy a car or most of the money to buy a house.
It doesn't even make sense. I think you meant to say "efficiently" perhaps but even arguing that is an uphill battle - at most you could say that is true for some types of projects.
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 make all of us worse off. Unchecked power is not and will never be a good thing.
>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.
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.g. with CO2 emissions: If you're an average "western" citizen, then you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability, and pointing at celebrities and their private jets or somesuch is no better than thinly veiled whataboutism in my view.
> 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 change, but a lot of people are neither willing to pay more for gas or power, nor do they want to risk making local industry less competitive.
The sad truth is that almost any cost for environmental sustainability/emission reduction is already too much for a lot of people.
If there are no parties mainly concerned with climate sustainability, then that is very likely because voters are not sufficiently interested in such platforms, and are more receptive to messages like "will fight immigrants", "will fight use of incorrect pronouns" or "will prevent trans-women from fighting in womens MMA".
Speaking for the US: climate sustainability (as main focus) was up for election 25 years ago, and about half the nation did not even bother voting, so it seems unsurprising to me that focus has shifted away from this issue (and fair to blame voters for that).
The amount of CO2 emissions a human makes or even an average family makes pales in comparison to the emissions companies create. It was all advertising propaganda to reduce corporate accountability.
This is simply incorrect. CO2 emissions from a single passenger vehicle alone are ~5 tons/year (this is tailpipe missions only), while per capita emissions for EU/US citizens are between 5 and 15 tons/year.
So invididual transport alone (not even counting indirect emissions from vehicle construction, road infrastructure etc.) is already significant.
What fraction of emissions would you blame on corporations alone (which corporations)?
A lot of people own nothing or are in net debt though and all of those would get included in the bottom 50%.
Plus there is a strong "property of how you measure wealth" effect going into this. Specifically here we are largely comparing stuff like basic items as wealth for the bottom 50% and for the top 0.01% we are measuring stocks/crypto owned * market price which is a synthetic measure and can sort of balloon arbitrarily.
It would be more interesting to see things like the inequality of true apples to apples things like vehicles, land owned, fuel used, electricity used, etc.
An interesting apples to apples one is to see how inequal views on social media are. Which have a massive concentration effect as well.
Then you could measure how much we are funneling resources and attention on different categories.
> a report that argues global inequality has reached such extremes that urgent action has become essential.
This is always stated like if that was an obvious fact that somehow "action is needed" against the richest, but is it?
Does it matter that a few individuals are multi-billionaires (usually because of the notional value of shares they own)? I would say that it does not. What matters is how the majority and the poorest are faring, which is orthogonal.
Let them. Individuals can move but they can't take their properties or companies with them (in any real sense, they can take a piece of paper with their name on it).
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.
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