16 ms·

Wealth Shown to Scale

107 points by deepanchor 5y ago

petecooper 5y ago
I am most grateful for my Logitech MX Master 2 mouse scroll wheel and a shift key. Hold shift, give the scroll wheel enough momentum to undo the parking brake, and let physics do the rest.
bcg361 5y ago
Of note: The yearly GDP of america is 21 trillion.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
Missing: median US Black household wealth, $24,100; median US Hispanic household wealth, $36,100. Numbers as of 2019. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Well, it looks like two people were uncomfortable enough with these numbers to do something about it, and it only took 27 minutes! Unfortunately, y’all chose “stick my head in the sand” over “remediate the situation.” Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? These numbers are recent and reliably sourced. Try doing something productive, like, at least engaging with the data rather than trying to make it so people don’t see it. I expected more respect for facts from you, HN.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- deworms 5y ago
  Lifetime budgetary impact by race: White: +$200,000 Black: -$751,000 Hispanic: -$588,000 Puts your numbers in perspective Source: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2014-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2014-BUD.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2014-BUD/pdf/BUDG...
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    where is that in the document? no hits on the numbers you provided.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
neolog 5y ago
Matt if you're here, can you add an atom/rss feed?
yreg 5y ago
I find these scrolling websites unergonomic and not at all that good at getting the point across (other than "yeah, it's a lot"). Also, with the text-length budget of that site I think it's a shame it doesn't explain what wealth, profit, liquidity and cash-on-hand is. Better visualisations imo: - Tom Scott: A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg - How rich are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in Minecraft terms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvttV8EIoGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvttV8EIoGA
iratic0 5y ago
Nice graphic, but also a bit misleading. Bezos would never be able to immediately realise that amount of assets in to useful cash. So saying no human deserves this amount of wealth is kind of already fulfilled? He may have 2 or 3 billion as cash maybe.
- opheliate 5y ago
  The author responds to this at about $14.8 billion into the "400 richest Americans" section, see [0], which they link to. 0: https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE_PAPER_BILLIONAIRE.md https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE...
- albertgoeswoof 5y ago
  There are many, many ways that wealth is realized without spending it. Once you get past a few hundred million you literally cannot spend the money as fast as it comes in. These billionaires aren't amassing wealth to spend it on things, they're gathering it for power, leverage, status, prestige, legacy reasons etc, and using it to influence and control the world to further their own agenda.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    In Bezos's case, he built a company that literally didn't even exist 27 years ago. It's gotten so huge, because globalization has gotten so effective. That's true of all tech companies: they benefit disproportionately from globalization and network effects. As far as what to do about it? The only solution could be to break up Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. Taxation is not it. The Federal government and the Fed controls the money printer and influences how high these stock valuations are getting. They're a large part of the problem. We can't print trillions of dollars without side effects in supply, demand and price mechanics. In this case, dollars are chasing productive growth assets as yields in bonds hit the floor and go under zero in some countries. The growth in inequality correlates with the growth in the national debt, and monetary supply growth.
    - wildfire 5y ago
kfprt 5y ago
A society that is extreme in one category is likely to be extreme in other categories as well.
- durnygbur 5y ago
  Europeans were very fond of killing each other in the first half of 20th century for the profit of the richest industrialists. Divide, agitate, conquer, reap the profits.
  - kfprt 5y ago
    War is a Racket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
    - imtringued 5y ago
      Well, that is what happens with a positive time preference. Being wealthy today is better than being wealthy tomorrow. If you were to sit down and think about how war creates wealth you would at first think that it can't because it costs money to go to war and pillaging ruins the source of the spoils. However, the urgency of money (interest on debt) creates a desire to have it earlier than later. If you can pay your debts back sooner you avoid paying interest. Therefore it is in your best interest to overharvest your farms, overfish the waters, overgraze the field, exploit your workers and pillage the village. Of course, the same applies to the lender. He wants to earn as much money as possible so he must obtain it as early as possible so that his interest compounds. Of course in practice inflation puts a damper on that form of extortion and causes the time preference to shift negative. If your money is losing 50% of its value in 20 years you'd accumulate as little as possible and would rather receive money in the future because the amount of value you produce hasn't decreased which means you get twice as much coin in the future to represent the same amount of value.
tedjdziuba 5y ago
Fixed pie fallacy.
bb123 5y ago
I 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 billionaires. Time and time again the wealth of the middle classes ends up as collateral damage in attempts to tax the very top.
- kortilla 5y ago
  This is absolutely it. Any taxes on just the ultra wealthy raise so little money for the rest of the population that any large scale money raising requires taxes on doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners, etc. Pro-government spending advocates don’t like to emphasize this because people become a lot less supportive of these things when they see members of their own community getting hit.
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
    I would say rhetorically that ex post facto (am i using that right? kind of like caused by definition) taxes on the ultra wealthy that don't achieve that aren't actually taxes that target the ultra wealthy, but rather just marketing. I think Biden has tried get ahead of that issue with his no higher taxes on 400k pledge. We'll wait to see the reality though.
    - refurb 5y ago
      Biden's promise has already morphed into "household's making more than $400,000", not individuals. Suddenly all those dual tech worker couples in Silicon Valley are wealthy!
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        Dual tech worker couples making more than $400k in Silicon Valley are wealthy, and always have been. There's no suddenly about it. They aren't ultrawealthy members of the capitalist class, sure. But they are definitely wealthy, and pretending that they aren't is just phenomenally out of touch.
newdude116 5y ago
I don't understand the concept or the graphics are rendered wrong on my computer. Better would it be do explain with a standard distribution (what wealth isn't). Lets assume that 1 SD of income corresponds to 10 cm. So 3SD or 60cm, basically your screen size, corresponds to 99.7% of the population. Some random data from the internet: "The median household income in Franklin County Ohio is about $43,000 although the average household income is closer to $54,000. The standard deviation of household incomes is about $30,000. You pick a random sample of 50 households. What is the chance the average household income in your sample is over $60,000?" https://online.stat.psu.edu/stat100/lesson/8/8.3 https://online.stat.psu.edu/stat100/lesson/8/8.3 Household income may be even two earners. But assuming broadly 50k, sd 50k per person to make it easier and taking into account more affluent areas, only a few people make more than 200k per year. Now lets assume Bill Gates or the Oligarch of your choice makes 10% ROE on his wealth. If he has 100 Billion, this is 10 Billion a year. This should be 200,000 Standard Deviations. If one SD corresponds to 10 cm, this should be 20 km on our scale. So we can see the income of 99.7% of the population on our screen, but Bill Gates income would be 20 km away. (Hope I made no mistake, feel free to correct) PennState used an extraordinary bad example to teach the normal distribution, they chose a case where you have a fat tail distribution.
dredmorbius 5y ago
xkcd'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/ https://xkcd.com/980/
- GaneshSuriya 5y ago
  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?
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Some I remember generally. A very few I recall directly ("Duty Calls" is 386, as in the Intle chip.) "Money" made an impression at the time. I DDG'd "xkcd money" to pull the URL. Other times I just suspect that there's a relevant xkcd and try some keywords.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      "Duty calls" as in "Someone is wrong on the Internet!", I'm fairly sure. Hey, it's that new hot processor, so a fairly memorable number. "Little Bobby Tables" is 327 IIRC; also the CI capacity of an old American V8 engine (a Ford, I think).
ekianjo 5y ago
Erm, how about the wealth/money controlled by the Federal government? That's much bigger than anything shown here.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  And, in theory at least, belongs to and serves the people as a whole. Not one single solitary exclusive and extraordinarily privileged human being.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    In theory. In practice, this wealth is controlled and overseen by privately owned commercial banks that look out for the interest of their owners, i.e. primarily the super-wealthy.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Would that wealth be more or less accountable to the people at large if it were in a small number of private hands?
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > in theory at least creating inflation sure helps people as a whole!
sooheon 5y ago
The 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=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EHKZRLcW4AA1aju?format=jpg&name=...
- sidcool 5y ago
  Genuine question. Ia rent seeker being used as a metaphor here?
  - sooheon 5y ago
    The economic definition is being used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking (there is debate about which activities qualify, but the gist is obvious)
- esarbe 5y ago
  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.
  - cousin_it 5y ago
    > 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.
  - refurb 5y ago
    What is a "living salary"? If I'm a single mom with 3 kids, is the "living salary" the same as a single 20 year old who lives at home?
esarbe 5y ago
Nice work! People don't really have an understanding of how much wealth has been coalescing in the last thirty years and this is a good start as showing them how skewed things really are. Seriously; this is dangerous. Concentrating that much wealth in such few hands is bound to have negative consequences. And all of us professionals really should get onboard trying to tackle this.
vishnugupta 5y ago
I'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 in cash that could he could use for charities, moonshot projects etc., There's also a matter of confidence. How will the markets react if the founder of Amazon were to liquidate his Amazon holdings? So it seems to me that not all of his wealth is usable. Does it mean we need better ways of gauging wealth? Especially when trying to assert things like "X% of his wealth is enough to house all homeless veterans for an year". His wealth is locked up in some form which though is valued in USD won't translate 1-1 to other forms of wealth.
- pydry 5y ago
  You're hypothesizing that he might want to spend 180 billion dollars in a single day? If you don't assume that it makes no sense to assume he'd want to liquidate it all at once. Liquidity != wealth Illiquid wealth != unreal wealth. It's really odd how many people seem to have been led to believe it is equivalent though... I'm curious to know where they all picked up this misconception.
  - Folcon 5y ago
    I mean that is broadly how we come to compare wealth, we don't spend much time going into the weeds of how that number came into being and what assumptions were made there. So I'm not surprised that some people think that of money. That being said he has gone through a divorce, he did lose a good chunk of his assets pretty quickly. Sure it was just a reallocation of assets, but unless you specifically want all of that money in cash you don't need do actually sell it. Banks for example will give you cash against the value of shares, allowing you access to liquid funds while you're slowly selling the equity. Anything specific cause you want to spend all of that money on will probably have a limit at which you can spend at, there just isn't enough stuff in the world or people offering services to absorb all that wealth instantly. Trying to cure all the world's diseases will very quickly consume all lab and relevant researcher capacity, which will only grow at the rate people start skill retraining to this new lucrative career. So I'm not sure it matters? I mean assuming the underlying share value doesn't freefall for some reason.
chiefangel1 5y ago
yes that is straight facts i’m looking for anonymous on hacker news im serious im trying to see the true power of a hacker by talking to y’all and being curious
durnygbur 5y ago
I'm always wondering how the capital gains work for the rich, or rather how they work around it. In case he sells the Amazon stock, it means he is due 28.6% American capital gains tax ie. 53 billion USD? I don't think so... the wealth of the richest basically have multiplied in the last 2 years...
perryizgr8 5y ago
> No single human needs or deserves this much wealth. Why not?
- exporectomy 5y ago
  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.
  - somefuckingguy 5y ago
    Let's just pray that our feudal overlords invests wisely!
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      Or not. It doesn't matter. Some already have so it can't get any worse. They've already generated enormous value in doing the thing that made them rich. They're not feudal lords. We own our own property, not Bezos. He has almost no power over us. If nobody told you he was so rich, you wouldn't even know. That's how little it matters beyond jealousy.
iamgopal 5y ago
Means with Top 5 country defense budget, we could solve all humanity’s problems? Who are we kidding really ? Why target rich people?
iamgopal 5y ago
A simple calculation can show that, with just defense budget of top 10 country, the world could install enough solar cell to power the world day and night, forever. But will we do it ? I don’t think things can go stupider that this. Future generations will see us in the same level of stupidity with which we see flat earth believer from centuries ago.
yonatron 5y ago
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?
Tycho 5y ago
I can think of no better illustration of the inequality in our society than this: the poor and middle class drink £5 bottles of wine purchased from Aldi, while the rich drink £50,000 bottles of wine. It’s truly shocking.
- lumberingjack 5y ago
  I work in super wealthy people's homes mostly Procter & Gamble executives general electric executives a few celebrities. We're working on this wine cellar right now for a inventor of some wood glue called gorilla I think they also make cell phone glass, 5000 wine bottles. To start with the wine cellar and the deck above it cost about a million when the wine company came in the start filling the racks I couldn't afford one bottle. This project went on about 6 months too long but the homeowner didn't care. She got billed about $100,000 a month for work that should have been completed about 7 months earlier 100% knows this doesn't care. I'm fairly certain they just want to show their friends that they're having worked done to their house so they pay us to stand around and fix the tiniest little inconsistency/blemish. This is basically normal these days. Another project I worked on in high school I'm still working on today and that was 20 years ago we built one of the largest homes in America in phases to hide the cost it's in Dayton Ohio and it's probably the most luxurious property ever conceived of it's basically a preppers billion dollar project complete with its own power plant that's an old train a lake that's climate controlled with rare species in it that also includes full-time marine biologist. When Carl lindner built the Great American insurance Tower in Cincinnati the entire building was designed around his personal office and the view into the reds stadium so that he could see his team play they literally built the building around his office view. You want stories of extravagance relating to personal construction with these people I got the stories we painted Carl linder Jr house once outside red white and blue just for a one weekend event involving George w bush. It was a 35,000 ft house took us a month and then took us another month to turn it back. When Jessica Simpson was married to Nick lachey I worked in their home Jessica basically expected everyone to do everything for her not only was I construction crew I had to pick up her dirty clothes too. This is the normal behavior I have to deal with. It's kind of rare but I worked in this Uber Democrats house a few years ago her basement was filled with fresh boxes that weighed like 50 pounds a piece and I had to move about a hundred of them I got real curious and opened up a box they were all filled with Michelle Obama books I estimated there is about 120,000 "becoming it Michelle Obama" books. ever wonder why Michelle Obama sold so many books? it's because about 20 people bought 100,000 a piece.
pembrook 5y ago
While I love the UX of this site and how well executed it is, I think it’s spreading misconceptions about how the world works. Human behavior is driven by contagious imitation (monkey-see monkey-do), and we all pile into the same behaviors at the same time, so this inequality will always exist. No matter how equitable the system. Of all the content on the internet, 1% of it gets 99% of the traffic. Of all the movies on Netflix, 1% get 99% of the eyeballs. Of all the businesses on earth, 1% get 99% of the customers. Of all the stocks in the stock market, a tiny percentage generate ALL of the returns. I could go on and on. Fundamentally, value-creation in a connected world results in an exponential (log) function, not a linear one. And people’s brains turn to mush when trying to comprehend exponential vs. linear growth. You can look at similar wealth curves in the supposedly more equitable nordics to see how similar they are if scaled up to a population the size of the US. On an exponential curve, extending the x-axis 100X further results in equally extreme outcomes like Jeff Bezos. Basically, everything humans do results in extreme inequality. So while we should certainly raise taxes on the mega-rich, the goal shouldn’t be eliminating exponential inequality altogether. Because it’s a base property of humanity.
compsciphd 5y ago
the scales apparently change? it took me a lot longer to scroll through bezos orannge than 185x the 1 Billion Blue rectangle.
tasuki 5y ago
Why is it a problem for Jeff Bezos to have this much wealth? As a human society, we produce and we consume things. It sucks if some people consume a lot and not enough is left for others. I'd rather see us pile on people who overconsume rather than on those who overproduce.
_nicelaris_ 5y ago
A) Nice. Good for Bezos. B) He has nowhere near that much actual money at his disposal. Such arguments are embarrassingly ignorant of how wealth and economics works. If he liquidated all of his assets and actually cashed in all of his net worth, then sure, but his overall wealth is currently represented by hundreds of thousands of jobs, massive operations of server farms, brick and mortar warehouses, fleets of delivery trucks, etc. Anger and outrage (let's be honest, this is all just envy at the end of the day) over the wealth of Bezos nothing to do with caring about the plight of those who make less money and everything to do with ignorance, laziness and lack of any sense of personal responsibility for their own financial situation. C) Go ahead and push for increased regulation that targets the ultra wealthy and see just how much they profit from said laws at your expense. You do understand that the billionaire class is behind most of the pressure on regulators to tighten market restrictions, right? They work it to their own advantage in order to prevent competition and retain their own economic hegemony. You want more equitable economic conditions? Then abolish market regulations.
rogerb 5y ago
A lot of the comments (not all) really personalize the issue by using Jeff Bezos as the villain, when it's the system and laws that have allowed him to capture so much wealth that is the problem. And IMHO, that's the part that needs addressing, by putting a progressive tax in place. Jeff's not the enemy - he's been amazingly successful within the rules that we as a society have made. Some of these rules are oppressive and bad and we should fix them.
jpn 5y ago
Bezos's wealth comes out to be about $500 per person. I would be more than happy to pay $500 to another Bezos that provides my life was as much value. Amazon is so convenient!
laverya 5y ago
I wish they included a few more things at the end, like "US National Debt", "Total US Government Debt", etc.
iJohnDoe 5y ago
Best way to wrap your mind around wealth. 1 thousand seconds = 16.6 minutes 1 million seconds = 11 days, 13 hours 1 billion seconds = 32 years 1 trillion seconds = 31,688 years
Maursault 5y ago
The top 400 wealthiest could purchase 246 Nimitz class aircraft carriers, and still have about $2B in change ($5M each). The US has 10 (of 20 total US carriers). Or, put another way, the top 400 could duplicate the entire US Navy fleet 5 times over (so, like, 55 super carriers, 100 carriers, 340 destroyers, 330 submarines, 2560 F/A-18E/F, etc.) and still have $370B in change ($925M each).

107 points by deepanchor 5y ago

I am most grateful for my Logitech MX Master 2 mouse scroll wheel and a shift key. Hold shift, give the scroll wheel enough momentum to undo the parking brake, and let physics do the rest.

bcg361 5y ago

Of note: The yearly GDP of america is 21 trillion.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

Missing: median US Black household wealth, $24,100; median US Hispanic household wealth, $36,100. Numbers as of 2019. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...

actually_a_dog 5y ago
Well, it looks like two people were uncomfortable enough with these numbers to do something about it, and it only took 27 minutes! Unfortunately, y’all chose “stick my head in the sand” over “remediate the situation.” Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? These numbers are recent and reliably sourced. Try doing something productive, like, at least engaging with the data rather than trying to make it so people don’t see it. I expected more respect for facts from you, HN.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
deworms 5y ago
Lifetime budgetary impact by race: White: +$200,000 Black: -$751,000 Hispanic: -$588,000 Puts your numbers in perspective Source: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2014-BUD/pdf/BUDGET-2014-BUD.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2014-BUD/pdf/BUDG...
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  where is that in the document? no hits on the numbers you provided.
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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neolog 5y ago

Matt if you're here, can you add an atom/rss feed?

yreg 5y ago

I find these scrolling websites unergonomic and not at all that good at getting the point across (other than "yeah, it's a lot"). Also, with the text-length budget of that site I think it's a shame it doesn't explain what wealth, profit, liquidity and cash-on-hand is. Better visualisations imo: - Tom Scott: A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg - How rich are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in Minecraft terms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvttV8EIoGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvttV8EIoGA

iratic0 5y ago

Nice graphic, but also a bit misleading. Bezos would never be able to immediately realise that amount of assets in to useful cash. So saying no human deserves this amount of wealth is kind of already fulfilled? He may have 2 or 3 billion as cash maybe.

opheliate 5y ago
The author responds to this at about $14.8 billion into the "400 richest Americans" section, see [0], which they link to. 0: https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE_PAPER_BILLIONAIRE.md https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE...
albertgoeswoof 5y ago
There are many, many ways that wealth is realized without spending it. Once you get past a few hundred million you literally cannot spend the money as fast as it comes in. These billionaires aren't amassing wealth to spend it on things, they're gathering it for power, leverage, status, prestige, legacy reasons etc, and using it to influence and control the world to further their own agenda.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  In Bezos's case, he built a company that literally didn't even exist 27 years ago. It's gotten so huge, because globalization has gotten so effective. That's true of all tech companies: they benefit disproportionately from globalization and network effects. As far as what to do about it? The only solution could be to break up Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. Taxation is not it. The Federal government and the Fed controls the money printer and influences how high these stock valuations are getting. They're a large part of the problem. We can't print trillions of dollars without side effects in supply, demand and price mechanics. In this case, dollars are chasing productive growth assets as yields in bonds hit the floor and go under zero in some countries. The growth in inequality correlates with the growth in the national debt, and monetary supply growth.
  - wildfire 5y ago

kfprt 5y ago

A society that is extreme in one category is likely to be extreme in other categories as well.

durnygbur 5y ago
Europeans were very fond of killing each other in the first half of 20th century for the profit of the richest industrialists. Divide, agitate, conquer, reap the profits.
- kfprt 5y ago
  War is a Racket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Well, that is what happens with a positive time preference. Being wealthy today is better than being wealthy tomorrow. If you were to sit down and think about how war creates wealth you would at first think that it can't because it costs money to go to war and pillaging ruins the source of the spoils. However, the urgency of money (interest on debt) creates a desire to have it earlier than later. If you can pay your debts back sooner you avoid paying interest. Therefore it is in your best interest to overharvest your farms, overfish the waters, overgraze the field, exploit your workers and pillage the village. Of course, the same applies to the lender. He wants to earn as much money as possible so he must obtain it as early as possible so that his interest compounds. Of course in practice inflation puts a damper on that form of extortion and causes the time preference to shift negative. If your money is losing 50% of its value in 20 years you'd accumulate as little as possible and would rather receive money in the future because the amount of value you produce hasn't decreased which means you get twice as much coin in the future to represent the same amount of value.

tedjdziuba 5y ago

Fixed pie fallacy.

bb123 5y ago

I 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 billionaires. Time and time again the wealth of the middle classes ends up as collateral damage in attempts to tax the very top.

kortilla 5y ago
This is absolutely it. Any taxes on just the ultra wealthy raise so little money for the rest of the population that any large scale money raising requires taxes on doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners, etc. Pro-government spending advocates don’t like to emphasize this because people become a lot less supportive of these things when they see members of their own community getting hit.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  I would say rhetorically that ex post facto (am i using that right? kind of like caused by definition) taxes on the ultra wealthy that don't achieve that aren't actually taxes that target the ultra wealthy, but rather just marketing. I think Biden has tried get ahead of that issue with his no higher taxes on 400k pledge. We'll wait to see the reality though.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Biden's promise has already morphed into "household's making more than $400,000", not individuals. Suddenly all those dual tech worker couples in Silicon Valley are wealthy!
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      Dual tech worker couples making more than $400k in Silicon Valley are wealthy, and always have been. There's no suddenly about it. They aren't ultrawealthy members of the capitalist class, sure. But they are definitely wealthy, and pretending that they aren't is just phenomenally out of touch.

newdude116 5y ago

I don't understand the concept or the graphics are rendered wrong on my computer. Better would it be do explain with a standard distribution (what wealth isn't). Lets assume that 1 SD of income corresponds to 10 cm. So 3SD or 60cm, basically your screen size, corresponds to 99.7% of the population. Some random data from the internet: "The median household income in Franklin County Ohio is about $43,000 although the average household income is closer to $54,000. The standard deviation of household incomes is about $30,000. You pick a random sample of 50 households. What is the chance the average household income in your sample is over $60,000?" https://online.stat.psu.edu/stat100/lesson/8/8.3 https://online.stat.psu.edu/stat100/lesson/8/8.3 Household income may be even two earners. But assuming broadly 50k, sd 50k per person to make it easier and taking into account more affluent areas, only a few people make more than 200k per year. Now lets assume Bill Gates or the Oligarch of your choice makes 10% ROE on his wealth. If he has 100 Billion, this is 10 Billion a year. This should be 200,000 Standard Deviations. If one SD corresponds to 10 cm, this should be 20 km on our scale. So we can see the income of 99.7% of the population on our screen, but Bill Gates income would be 20 km away. (Hope I made no mistake, feel free to correct) PennState used an extraordinary bad example to teach the normal distribution, they chose a case where you have a fat tail distribution.

dredmorbius 5y ago

xkcd'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/ https://xkcd.com/980/

GaneshSuriya 5y ago
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?
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Some I remember generally. A very few I recall directly ("Duty Calls" is 386, as in the Intle chip.) "Money" made an impression at the time. I DDG'd "xkcd money" to pull the URL. Other times I just suspect that there's a relevant xkcd and try some keywords.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    "Duty calls" as in "Someone is wrong on the Internet!", I'm fairly sure. Hey, it's that new hot processor, so a fairly memorable number. "Little Bobby Tables" is 327 IIRC; also the CI capacity of an old American V8 engine (a Ford, I think).

ekianjo 5y ago

Erm, how about the wealth/money controlled by the Federal government? That's much bigger than anything shown here.

dredmorbius 5y ago
And, in theory at least, belongs to and serves the people as a whole. Not one single solitary exclusive and extraordinarily privileged human being.
- esarbe 5y ago
  In theory. In practice, this wealth is controlled and overseen by privately owned commercial banks that look out for the interest of their owners, i.e. primarily the super-wealthy.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Would that wealth be more or less accountable to the people at large if it were in a small number of private hands?
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > in theory at least creating inflation sure helps people as a whole!

sooheon 5y ago

The 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=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EHKZRLcW4AA1aju?format=jpg&name=...

sidcool 5y ago
Genuine question. Ia rent seeker being used as a metaphor here?
- sooheon 5y ago
  The economic definition is being used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking (there is debate about which activities qualify, but the gist is obvious)
esarbe 5y ago
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.
- cousin_it 5y ago
  > 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.
- refurb 5y ago
  What is a "living salary"? If I'm a single mom with 3 kids, is the "living salary" the same as a single 20 year old who lives at home?

esarbe 5y ago

Nice work! People don't really have an understanding of how much wealth has been coalescing in the last thirty years and this is a good start as showing them how skewed things really are. Seriously; this is dangerous. Concentrating that much wealth in such few hands is bound to have negative consequences. And all of us professionals really should get onboard trying to tackle this.

vishnugupta 5y ago

I'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 in cash that could he could use for charities, moonshot projects etc., There's also a matter of confidence. How will the markets react if the founder of Amazon were to liquidate his Amazon holdings? So it seems to me that not all of his wealth is usable. Does it mean we need better ways of gauging wealth? Especially when trying to assert things like "X% of his wealth is enough to house all homeless veterans for an year". His wealth is locked up in some form which though is valued in USD won't translate 1-1 to other forms of wealth.

pydry 5y ago
You're hypothesizing that he might want to spend 180 billion dollars in a single day? If you don't assume that it makes no sense to assume he'd want to liquidate it all at once. Liquidity != wealth Illiquid wealth != unreal wealth. It's really odd how many people seem to have been led to believe it is equivalent though... I'm curious to know where they all picked up this misconception.
- Folcon 5y ago
  I mean that is broadly how we come to compare wealth, we don't spend much time going into the weeds of how that number came into being and what assumptions were made there. So I'm not surprised that some people think that of money. That being said he has gone through a divorce, he did lose a good chunk of his assets pretty quickly. Sure it was just a reallocation of assets, but unless you specifically want all of that money in cash you don't need do actually sell it. Banks for example will give you cash against the value of shares, allowing you access to liquid funds while you're slowly selling the equity. Anything specific cause you want to spend all of that money on will probably have a limit at which you can spend at, there just isn't enough stuff in the world or people offering services to absorb all that wealth instantly. Trying to cure all the world's diseases will very quickly consume all lab and relevant researcher capacity, which will only grow at the rate people start skill retraining to this new lucrative career. So I'm not sure it matters? I mean assuming the underlying share value doesn't freefall for some reason.

chiefangel1 5y ago

yes that is straight facts i’m looking for anonymous on hacker news im serious im trying to see the true power of a hacker by talking to y’all and being curious

durnygbur 5y ago

I'm always wondering how the capital gains work for the rich, or rather how they work around it. In case he sells the Amazon stock, it means he is due 28.6% American capital gains tax ie. 53 billion USD? I don't think so... the wealth of the richest basically have multiplied in the last 2 years...

perryizgr8 5y ago

> No single human needs or deserves this much wealth. Why not?

exporectomy 5y ago
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.
- somefuckingguy 5y ago
  Let's just pray that our feudal overlords invests wisely!
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Or not. It doesn't matter. Some already have so it can't get any worse. They've already generated enormous value in doing the thing that made them rich. They're not feudal lords. We own our own property, not Bezos. He has almost no power over us. If nobody told you he was so rich, you wouldn't even know. That's how little it matters beyond jealousy.

iamgopal 5y ago

Means with Top 5 country defense budget, we could solve all humanity’s problems? Who are we kidding really ? Why target rich people?

iamgopal 5y ago

A simple calculation can show that, with just defense budget of top 10 country, the world could install enough solar cell to power the world day and night, forever. But will we do it ? I don’t think things can go stupider that this. Future generations will see us in the same level of stupidity with which we see flat earth believer from centuries ago.

yonatron 5y ago

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?

Tycho 5y ago

I can think of no better illustration of the inequality in our society than this: the poor and middle class drink £5 bottles of wine purchased from Aldi, while the rich drink £50,000 bottles of wine. It’s truly shocking.

lumberingjack 5y ago
I work in super wealthy people's homes mostly Procter & Gamble executives general electric executives a few celebrities. We're working on this wine cellar right now for a inventor of some wood glue called gorilla I think they also make cell phone glass, 5000 wine bottles. To start with the wine cellar and the deck above it cost about a million when the wine company came in the start filling the racks I couldn't afford one bottle. This project went on about 6 months too long but the homeowner didn't care. She got billed about $100,000 a month for work that should have been completed about 7 months earlier 100% knows this doesn't care. I'm fairly certain they just want to show their friends that they're having worked done to their house so they pay us to stand around and fix the tiniest little inconsistency/blemish. This is basically normal these days. Another project I worked on in high school I'm still working on today and that was 20 years ago we built one of the largest homes in America in phases to hide the cost it's in Dayton Ohio and it's probably the most luxurious property ever conceived of it's basically a preppers billion dollar project complete with its own power plant that's an old train a lake that's climate controlled with rare species in it that also includes full-time marine biologist. When Carl lindner built the Great American insurance Tower in Cincinnati the entire building was designed around his personal office and the view into the reds stadium so that he could see his team play they literally built the building around his office view. You want stories of extravagance relating to personal construction with these people I got the stories we painted Carl linder Jr house once outside red white and blue just for a one weekend event involving George w bush. It was a 35,000 ft house took us a month and then took us another month to turn it back. When Jessica Simpson was married to Nick lachey I worked in their home Jessica basically expected everyone to do everything for her not only was I construction crew I had to pick up her dirty clothes too. This is the normal behavior I have to deal with. It's kind of rare but I worked in this Uber Democrats house a few years ago her basement was filled with fresh boxes that weighed like 50 pounds a piece and I had to move about a hundred of them I got real curious and opened up a box they were all filled with Michelle Obama books I estimated there is about 120,000 "becoming it Michelle Obama" books. ever wonder why Michelle Obama sold so many books? it's because about 20 people bought 100,000 a piece.

pembrook 5y ago

While I love the UX of this site and how well executed it is, I think it’s spreading misconceptions about how the world works. Human behavior is driven by contagious imitation (monkey-see monkey-do), and we all pile into the same behaviors at the same time, so this inequality will always exist. No matter how equitable the system. Of all the content on the internet, 1% of it gets 99% of the traffic. Of all the movies on Netflix, 1% get 99% of the eyeballs. Of all the businesses on earth, 1% get 99% of the customers. Of all the stocks in the stock market, a tiny percentage generate ALL of the returns. I could go on and on. Fundamentally, value-creation in a connected world results in an exponential (log) function, not a linear one. And people’s brains turn to mush when trying to comprehend exponential vs. linear growth. You can look at similar wealth curves in the supposedly more equitable nordics to see how similar they are if scaled up to a population the size of the US. On an exponential curve, extending the x-axis 100X further results in equally extreme outcomes like Jeff Bezos. Basically, everything humans do results in extreme inequality. So while we should certainly raise taxes on the mega-rich, the goal shouldn’t be eliminating exponential inequality altogether. Because it’s a base property of humanity.

compsciphd 5y ago

the scales apparently change? it took me a lot longer to scroll through bezos orannge than 185x the 1 Billion Blue rectangle.

tasuki 5y ago

Why is it a problem for Jeff Bezos to have this much wealth? As a human society, we produce and we consume things. It sucks if some people consume a lot and not enough is left for others. I'd rather see us pile on people who overconsume rather than on those who overproduce.

_nicelaris_ 5y ago

A) Nice. Good for Bezos. B) He has nowhere near that much actual money at his disposal. Such arguments are embarrassingly ignorant of how wealth and economics works. If he liquidated all of his assets and actually cashed in all of his net worth, then sure, but his overall wealth is currently represented by hundreds of thousands of jobs, massive operations of server farms, brick and mortar warehouses, fleets of delivery trucks, etc. Anger and outrage (let's be honest, this is all just envy at the end of the day) over the wealth of Bezos nothing to do with caring about the plight of those who make less money and everything to do with ignorance, laziness and lack of any sense of personal responsibility for their own financial situation. C) Go ahead and push for increased regulation that targets the ultra wealthy and see just how much they profit from said laws at your expense. You do understand that the billionaire class is behind most of the pressure on regulators to tighten market restrictions, right? They work it to their own advantage in order to prevent competition and retain their own economic hegemony. You want more equitable economic conditions? Then abolish market regulations.

rogerb 5y ago

A lot of the comments (not all) really personalize the issue by using Jeff Bezos as the villain, when it's the system and laws that have allowed him to capture so much wealth that is the problem. And IMHO, that's the part that needs addressing, by putting a progressive tax in place. Jeff's not the enemy - he's been amazingly successful within the rules that we as a society have made. Some of these rules are oppressive and bad and we should fix them.

jpn 5y ago

Bezos's wealth comes out to be about $500 per person. I would be more than happy to pay $500 to another Bezos that provides my life was as much value. Amazon is so convenient!

laverya 5y ago

I wish they included a few more things at the end, like "US National Debt", "Total US Government Debt", etc.

iJohnDoe 5y ago

Best way to wrap your mind around wealth. 1 thousand seconds = 16.6 minutes 1 million seconds = 11 days, 13 hours 1 billion seconds = 32 years 1 trillion seconds = 31,688 years

Maursault 5y ago

The top 400 wealthiest could purchase 246 Nimitz class aircraft carriers, and still have about $2B in change ($5M each). The US has 10 (of 20 total US carriers). Or, put another way, the top 400 could duplicate the entire US Navy fleet 5 times over (so, like, 55 super carriers, 100 carriers, 340 destroyers, 330 submarines, 2560 F/A-18E/F, etc.) and still have $370B in change ($925M each).