9 ms·

Ten richest men have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1B people

90 points by melenaboija 5y ago

maratc 5y ago
A reminder: take any sum operation of wealth with a huge grain of salt. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUS228821959920140404 https://www.reuters.com/article/idUS228821959920140404
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  Yes this is true, but also we'll have trillionaires added to our spellchecker dictionaries in a couple years. We really do have a huge problem on our hands.
  - TheFreim 5y ago
    As I said in my comment I just made in this thread, I think concerns with wealth inequality are often based on understandable and reasonable concerns. However, I do always wonder what the actual issue is. Would it matter if there are ultra-wealthy people if the non-ultra-wealthy had a good standard of living? Personally, and maybe this is a wrong outlook, I don't care that someone is a billionaire as long as I'm able to live a fulfilling life myself. What do you think?
    - jrh206 5y ago
      I think I’d be ok with that. Trouble is, right now, plenty of people don’t have a good standard of living, and the wealth accumulated by the ultra-wealthy could make a dent in that.
    - choko 5y ago
      This is my philosophy as well. First off, inflation exists which is one of the factors in creating a "trillionaire" Second, the amount of wealth is not fixed. Someone having more doesn't mean that others have less. I think many people don't understand where money comes from, lending to their fears of a large wealth gap.
    - pastacacioepepe 5y ago
      > Would it matter if there are ultra-wealthy people if the non-ultra-wealthy had a good standard of living? Do you think that is possible? Because I only see the situation getting worse and worse from here. What we should ask ourselves is, is a system where 10 people can own six times more than 3.1B compatible with the goal of solving poverty and granting a decent life standard to everyone?
      - School-Cotton 5y ago
        > Do you think that is possible? Because I only see the situation getting worse and worse from here. Of course it’s possible. The material standard of living of the poorest people has consistently been making huge gains since the beginning of the industrial revolution and continues to do so, despite wealth inequality. This is backed up by every objective metric you can think of.
        pastacacioepepe 5y ago
        That is a consequence of technological progress and not of capitalism. Don't conflate one into the other.
        School-Cotton 5y ago
        Nowhere did I say it was a consequence of capitalism.
    - Arubis 5y ago
      It’s next-order effects over time. In and of itself, someone having more resources than you or I doesn’t affect our lifestyle, happiness, etc. But wealth in our society leads to concentration of power, and fear of loss (among others, some speculation here on my part) leads people of means to pursue policies to preserve their positioning regardless of the consequences for others in society. These self-reinforce over time unless Something Is Done About It. Last century, Something included unions, progressive taxation, and wealth redistribution, and that seemed to work for a while. Previous means were much bloodier.
    - brightstep 5y ago
      It does matter: wealth represents resources. Huge wealth inequality allocates resources, and therefore decisions of how to allocate those resources, into a small number of hands. Take Bezos' rocket and mega yacht. Is that a useful way to to apply the huge amount of materials and labor it took to create? What could we have done instead?
      - cloverich 5y ago
        To play devil's advocate, we could tax 100% of the wealth of those individuals which would cover the cost of another US invasion of Iraq.
      - Jensson 5y ago
        The sum cost of the worlds luxury projects like yachts or super mansions or personal jets etc is still a tiny fraction of the economy, taxes are a much bigger concern than those. And other than such projects the wealth of wealthy people are resources used wisely investing in production capabilities of products people want to buy, like new CPU generations or new warehouses etc. This is how most resources governed by the wealthy is allocated, which seems entirely reasonable, having a small fraction of that get lost to their personal whims seems like a very cheap price to pay for the efficiency of capitalism compared to other systems, we already pay like 40% in taxes, why not pay 1% or so tax to capitalism?
    - danbruc 5y ago
      No one can earn a billion. You only get that rich by being in the right position to siphon off money from the work of others. If you make a great inventions, its still the thousands of employees doing the actual work, you are just in the right position to take a bit from each and get really rich. If you invest your money, you are in the right position to set the terms, and you will choose terms that even after accounting for the risk and opportunity costs and so on some additional money ends up in your wallet. So even if everyone could live well because the amount of money siphoned away is not to much, there would still be some unfairness in the system that I would want to see go away.
      - kiba 5y ago
        Your income from jobs is never based on your moral worth, only what society thinks is monetarily valuable.
        danbruc 5y ago
        I am not sure what you mean with moral worth, but of course no one will pay more than what they value something. If producing something does not pay the bills because no one values that thing, then you should not produce that thing.
    - 3pt14159 5y ago
      If there were no arms races in our economy and no negative externalities to vast wealth (including power imbalances) then I would have no issue because there would not be negative effects on the lives of others. But the issue is that every billionaire mansion creates real waste. Real plastic in the ocean. Real strip mines. Real greenhouse gasses. The land they occupy is land others cannot occupy. And besides all that, they poison our discourse with media companies that are run at a loss and they lie to us with fake scientific studies.
  - lstodd 5y ago
    The problem of having trillionaries in our spellchecker dictionaries? Seriously? I think we have quite more pressing problems than that right now.
- pydry 5y ago
  He's saying that this is a misleading figure because a lot of people have a lot of negative wealth. That's apparently supposed to ameliorate how bad this looks but as far as I can see it only serves to emphasize how bad the problem is.
  - fennecfoxen 5y ago
    It’s not just that though. It’s also because a lot of people with $0 or subzero wealth have reasonable incomes, and a lot of people with a small but positive amount of wealth have very little income (China in particular). The overall well-being depends more on income including the imputed value of social services, not the stock of wealth. Wealth comparisons generally are fraught even besides this. The most valuable asset of the average human, by far, is their human capital. These and social services and purchasing power parities can be measured and compared for a more meaningful result, and highlight the truly poor, but this piece isn’t it. It’s just agitprop.
    - pydry 5y ago
      >The most valuable asset of the average human, by far, is their human capital Yes, and if you are a doctor saving lives with a high income and high negative wealth that human capital is being parasitically extracted via the rent you pay, via student loan repayments, via eye watering malpractice insurance rates and laundered via the financial system to make somebody else even richer. Dont you see how this makes it even worse? The greater wealth inequality grows the less you get to keep the output of your own human capital. And yea, maybe you can still do all of that and live a decent enough life. That isnt the point. This isnt a revolt against productivity. It's a revolt against parasites.
    - xg15 5y ago
      > The overall well-being depends more on income including the imputed value of social services, not the stock of wealth. That's an assumption that needs to be backed up. Many high-net worth individuals have almost zero nominal income - yet they are still extremely wealthy, enjoy a high standard of living and have significant influence. This can make income-only "wealth" statistics look a lot more balanced than the reality is. On the other hand, debt absolutely has an effect on your quality of living and the degree of freedom you have in your decisions. E.g., if someone barely manages to pay off a mortgage, they will have little disposable income for other expenses, such as medical emergencies - even though, on the face of it, they may have a decent middle-class income.
- xg15 5y ago
  I'm not convinced. The article makes a valid point that including debt into the statistics makes it harder to make comparisons between segments. But then it uses that point to claim that we should not attempt to make any comparisons at all because everyone is a unique snowflake etc etc: > The second lesson of this story is broader: that when you’re talking about poor people, aggregating wealth is a silly and ultimately pointless exercise. Some poor people have modest savings; some poor people are deeply in debt; some poor people have nothing at all. That seems like just muddying the waters to avoid some uncomfortable conclusions. By the way, buried in the center of the article, the author actually admids that the essence of the findings - highlighting the extreme wealth inequality - is correct: > Now $1.7 trillion is undoubtedly a lot of money: there is an astonishing amount of wealth inequality in the world, and it’s shocking that just 67 people are worth that much.
pinephoneguy 5y ago
There are many people who argue that the middle and working classes actually have less say in democracy (as opposed to say, monarchy) because the people at the top can easily afford to buy out all the media.
- david-gpu 5y ago
  > people at the top can easily afford to buy out all the media. Do autocracies have a history of freedom of the press? Can you think of many examples?
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
    I think the point might be that democracies are like autocracies -- just with extra steps. The wealthy and powerful call the shots in all in political systems.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      In non democracies the powerful takes the wealth and are therefore wealthy. In democracies many powerful people are still not wealthy since they don't have the power to just take it, and the wealthiest persons are far from the most powerful ones since there is a limit to what money can buy, that is the main difference.
      - pinephoneguy 5y ago
        Many European states (some of the better ones) are still monarchies.
        Jensson 5y ago
        They are still democracies, they just have some legacy celebrities they call King/Queen.
        5y ago
MaxMoney 5y ago
jonbrain 5y ago
- discordance 5y ago
  How absurd. It has only been like this in the last 10 - 20 years at most and this can easily change. It is not ‘life’.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - anm89 5y ago
    There are a HUGE number of historical counterfactuals to this. Musk and Bezos combined have about as much as Rockefeller had and that's just after accounting for inflation, not even considering the overall pie was much smaller then. Or look up Mansa Musa. so no, it hasn't "only been like this" for x amount of time. The world is less equal now than 50 years ago but drastically more equal than most of the rest of history.
    - choko 5y ago
      I think with the rise of FIAT based currency, you might have a hard time making a case that things are "less equal" than they were 50 years ago. Much of the wealth gap fear comes from a lack of understanding in how wealth is created resulting in zero-sum thinking.
- hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
  It is an economic system that humans set up and humans can change, it's not some fundamental property of life itself.
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    One problem is that this pareto curve appears in every human political system ever, which lasts for a few decades or more. It looks to be inherent to human societies. When left unchallenged, the wealthy become the defacto oligarchs. Only the oppressively incompetent, lazy, and corruption-competition of representative democracies seem to slow it down. In the govt being so slow, oligarchs get little direct control in their lifetime. Additionally, public scrutiny of the ultra wealthy (say 10 men) is relatively manageable, further hindering the indirect control. Ofc, maybe this is just my wishful thinking.
bedhead 5y ago
The pie isn’t fixed. One man being rich doesn’t make another man poor.
- pastacacioepepe 5y ago
  And yet, that is what happens. How do you explain it?
  - csee 5y ago
    You're conflating fiat, which is always zero sum when it changes hands in a transaction, with utility and value, which usually is positive sum. When I buy a phone, I am losing $500 to get something that cost $400 to make, and the phone company made $100. But I gained about $2000 worth of hidden value from that transaction because my life got way better and easier! That's why it wasn't zero sum and that's part of the explanation for wealth creation.
    - pastacacioepepe 5y ago
      You didn't really answer my question. I don't care if a market is a not a zero sum game or any other technicism. I want to know why if you think that a system that thrives on wealth inequality doesn't contribute to poverty, we see median househould incomes declining while all the prices are rising and a very small class of already rich people becomes ever richer.
      - kiba 5y ago
        We are seeing people hording land. These lands are not being given to developers and people who can make the best use of it, which are very likely to be other wealthy people. Instead of rewarding wealthy people for increasing the pie, we just give wealthy people free money for sitting on lands and having that appreciate, rather than selling it to someone who can use it. "Robust housing market" and rising price is not a good thing. It is a socioeconomic disaster. Another way we becomes poorer: Pattern of development that incentivize ownership of expensive items just to participate in society, like cars and roads.
juanani 5y ago
TheFreim 5y ago
The concerns people have with wealth concentration are often understandable and reasonable, but the way they're presented is often off-putting to me. I'd appreciate input on this matter from you all. For example, claims that "wealth inequality result in X deaths" seem clearly manipulative. It's not "inequality" of wealth, whatever that actually means, that kills them. If everyone had at least enough wealth to be physically and mentally healthy you could still have massive wealth inequality. Ergo, if wealth inequality can exist without the associated deaths then wealth inequality isn't the cause. Do you agree with my assessment? Why or why not?
- pfortuny 5y ago
  Totally. Lack of sanitation, food, etc… do cause deaths. Lack of equality is a fact of life. It cannot kill. Thanks. I agree with you totally.
- impossiblefork 5y ago
  It's, I think, more complicated than that. Lack of wealth is lack of power, and with a sufficient lack of wealth one has no power even over ones own living situation. That kind of thing is bad for people-- because they rent they have continuous uncertainty and can't change or build, which I think are human instincts which it costs something to suppress. Think of it as being restricted to working only on the production branch of a software project, where anythings done incorrectly has consequences for others.
- kiba 5y ago
  This is mostly a structural issue. The dollars amount that an individual has is basically a distraction. The wealthy has that much money in part because they don't have to compete with anyone else. This is especially true if you consider land, which are basically horded by the upper strata of society, and we allowed people to build wealth through property ownership rather than efficient use of land. You get strange words like "robust housing market" due to rising land price as if that's a good thing. Everyone who's looking to buy a home or rent get screwed by the market. Once you introduce competition and reward the wealthy for proper allocation not land hording, the stark inequality will likely be lower while the pie itself gets bigger.
consumer451 5y ago
I have heard Musk and others say that humans are not evolved for the onslaught of data and choice that the internet provides. I think the same could be true of having an extremely disproportionate amount of resources. Humans are just not evolved for that and it makes them behave strangely. The first symptom seems to be adopting a siege mentality. To be fair, even I have felt it a bit and my net worth is only a FAANG engineer’s yearly salary.
familymart 5y ago
temp8964 5y ago
How about power? Ten most powerful men have how many times of power of how many billions people? You don’t see that kind of report because power is difficult to quantify. Money maybe equivalent to power at some level, but Xi can easily make Jack Ma disappear. This means money means nothing in front of power. Power is obviously way more dangerous than money. And there’s way more inequality in power than in money.
newaccount2021 5y ago
aj_nikhil 5y ago
Strong labor laws are needed. The salary difference needs to be reduced.
- choko 5y ago
  Wealth is not based on salary. The difference comes from stocks and other illiquid wealth.
  - pastacacioepepe 5y ago
    Salaries didn't increase at the same rate as productivity did. Until you fix this imbalance, you will have raising wealth inequality.
- Hdhdndhhe 5y ago
  Reduce it and the engineers will leave
dougmwne 5y ago
The methodology note contains the calculations for the statistics in this paper's talking points: https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621341/tb-inequality-kills-methodology-note-170122-en.pdf?sequence=24 https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
verisimi 5y ago
Do we even know who the 10 richest men are? The wealthy are all using tax avoidance schemes and corporate structures to hide their wealth. I can certainly say, that if I was truly wealthy (and had the mindset to go with it) one of the first I would do is hide information on my wealth. Perhaps I'd even hire others to pretend to be wealthy, and take the flak, so I could go about my business. I'm sure billionaires/trillionaires would value their privacy at least as much as I do. And they've got the funds to buy it!
sva_ 5y ago
I sometimes wonder if the hoarding of wealth in some individuals/companies has a deflationary effect on currency.
nahuel0x 5y ago
Say what you want about Marx, but he was right when he postulated the capital tendency to concentration and centralization.
droro 5y ago
How to become a billionaire: 1. Start a company 2. Issue 1_000_000 shares to yourself 3. Find a friend who owes you a favor, then issue another share in the company and sell it to them for $1000 This is an extreme example, but most of the people on the world's richest list have been able to similarly inflate their net worth through illiquidity. Market caps are a misleading way to measure wealth. To take another example, the market cap of Tesla is based less on the company's physical assets than the anticipation of earnings over the next 20-30 years. My own net worth would look a lot better if it was calculated using the same methodology. I'm not trying to argue that inequality doesn't exist, but I think this obsession with the paper value of the 1-percenters is a distraction from the fact that reducing inequality needs to ultimately involve the redistribution of physical assets and labor. If we get obsessed with confiscating the abstract financial assets of billionaires, we will likely find out they don't have much buying power when being traded for real things like housing or energy.
- xg15 5y ago
  Agreed, except the aggregation of physical labor and assets is also not that simple. Many tech companies have very few assets on paper, yet nevertheless have an enormous amount of influence. I think in the end it comes back to comparing capital. Which sounds a bit familiar...
- Aunche 5y ago
  A YouTuber actually pulled off this stunt: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iHfJRON3b-w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iHfJRON3b-w
- btdmaster 5y ago
  Good point! Though, is it not true that these paper assets can be and are used to take out pseudo-gratis loans, hence in some sense they are real? Maybe the hypothetical billionaire is not worth that much, but the house he got against the paper wealth is definitely real and did not affect his financial power as much as it affects people buying it against 10% upfront.
- stefan_ 5y ago
  Well thankfully they have a bunch of suggestions if you were to just bother reading past the headline instead of nitpicking it to death with an imaginary scenario that does not apply to any of the 10 mentioned.
weatherlight 5y ago
The Roman republic fell for many reasons, one of the big reasons was Augustus Caesar controlled much of the world's most powerful states, including Egypt. This level of wealth today would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 trillion dollars or 40 times richer than Jeff Bezos. This fortune was so vast that Augustus was able to pay to recruit, train, and upkeep the entire Roman military- all 60 legions- alone. In addition, he was able to fund multiple grand building projects, massive political reforms, and keep a tidy fortune for himself and his heirs. Augustus became the Defacto state. These are rough numbers because currency conversion across 2 millennia is impossible. Augustus was worth at least 1/3 of the Roman Empires' total GDP. This means of every 3 dollars in the Roman Economy 1 dollar was Augustus’. Wealth concentration disrupts society and makes society susceptible autocratic holders of wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus#First_settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus#First_settlement https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Augustus https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Augustus
yboris 5y ago
A more-detailed look at inequality across the world can be seen through this interactive visualization I created: https://income-inequality.info/ https://income-inequality.info/ Comparing income distributions within countries and between countries in increments of 5% of the population in one unified graph. You can re-run the calculations yourself https://github.com/whyboris/income-inequality.info https://github.com/whyboris/income-inequality.info & https://github.com/whyboris/Global-Income-Distribution https://github.com/whyboris/Global-Income-Distribution
- 6510 5y ago
  the income graph is far less "comical" than the wealth graph: https://www.lcurve.org https://www.lcurve.org
Const-me 5y ago
I don’t think it’s possible to fix wealth inequality in any reasonable way. Here’s a trivially simple numeric simulation of zero-sum economy of 100k people: https://gist.github.com/Const-me/4b9b4372ba37c03feaf2f1475b10845e https://gist.github.com/Const-me/4b9b4372ba37c03feaf2f1475b1... Typical output: 10%: $10 20%: $20 Median: $70 80%: $165 90%: $235 99%: $475 99.9%: $705 Top 10 list: $1280, $1255, $1245, $1070, $1020, $1010, $1005, $995, $990, $965 So, after starting with $100 / each and doing large count of absolutely fair random transactions, we arrived at 10% of poorest people have less than $10, the median is $70, and the wealthiest person having almost 13x the initial amount. I hope no one is going to accuse the random number generator of being rigged by capitalists at Microsoft. That’s simply how the math works. Wealth inequality is natural. The real socio-economical issue is poverty, not wealth inequality.
juancn 5y ago
I don't get the expectation of justice here (from a purely analytic point of view). Power laws are pervasive across pretty much anything you look at. Why would wealth would be different? I understand the feeling of "it's not fair" (especially if you got the short end of the stick), but really, what is really fair other than random chance? It's quite hard to correct for an emergent phenomenon, I mean, something that seems to be a statistical property of the collective behavior of a large group of entities. Changing anything will have unintended consequences, since it's very difficult to predict the effects (as of why is this, I think non-linearity plays a big part, but that's a longer topic). My suspicion is that the middle-ages originated worldviews of western society are shifting now. Oversimplifying, there are two worldviews that come from religion in western cultures as far as I can tell. Catholic based worldviews, view poverty as a virtue, wealth as a sin (think Latin America). On the other hand protestant worldviews tend to think wealth is a sign of being good morally (US, UK, and some european countries). Lately, there's a shift in these, with the first one slowly showing its face in classically protestant countries, and a radicalization of the "poverty is good" view in historically catholic countries. As to why this is happening, it could be just a consequence of increased communication (i.e. everyone can voice an opinion online/see what's really going on far away) or something better organized.
moistly 5y ago
Maybe one should phrase it as “Ten most powerful men have more power than the least-powerful 3.1B people.” Money is power in this world as it currently works.

90 points by melenaboija 5y ago

A reminder: take any sum operation of wealth with a huge grain of salt. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUS228821959920140404 https://www.reuters.com/article/idUS228821959920140404

3pt14159 5y ago
Yes this is true, but also we'll have trillionaires added to our spellchecker dictionaries in a couple years. We really do have a huge problem on our hands.
- TheFreim 5y ago
  As I said in my comment I just made in this thread, I think concerns with wealth inequality are often based on understandable and reasonable concerns. However, I do always wonder what the actual issue is. Would it matter if there are ultra-wealthy people if the non-ultra-wealthy had a good standard of living? Personally, and maybe this is a wrong outlook, I don't care that someone is a billionaire as long as I'm able to live a fulfilling life myself. What do you think?
  - jrh206 5y ago
    I think I’d be ok with that. Trouble is, right now, plenty of people don’t have a good standard of living, and the wealth accumulated by the ultra-wealthy could make a dent in that.
  - choko 5y ago
    This is my philosophy as well. First off, inflation exists which is one of the factors in creating a "trillionaire" Second, the amount of wealth is not fixed. Someone having more doesn't mean that others have less. I think many people don't understand where money comes from, lending to their fears of a large wealth gap.
  - pastacacioepepe 5y ago
    > Would it matter if there are ultra-wealthy people if the non-ultra-wealthy had a good standard of living? Do you think that is possible? Because I only see the situation getting worse and worse from here. What we should ask ourselves is, is a system where 10 people can own six times more than 3.1B compatible with the goal of solving poverty and granting a decent life standard to everyone?
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      > Do you think that is possible? Because I only see the situation getting worse and worse from here. Of course it’s possible. The material standard of living of the poorest people has consistently been making huge gains since the beginning of the industrial revolution and continues to do so, despite wealth inequality. This is backed up by every objective metric you can think of.
      - pastacacioepepe 5y ago
        That is a consequence of technological progress and not of capitalism. Don't conflate one into the other.
        School-Cotton 5y ago
        Nowhere did I say it was a consequence of capitalism.
  - Arubis 5y ago
    It’s next-order effects over time. In and of itself, someone having more resources than you or I doesn’t affect our lifestyle, happiness, etc. But wealth in our society leads to concentration of power, and fear of loss (among others, some speculation here on my part) leads people of means to pursue policies to preserve their positioning regardless of the consequences for others in society. These self-reinforce over time unless Something Is Done About It. Last century, Something included unions, progressive taxation, and wealth redistribution, and that seemed to work for a while. Previous means were much bloodier.
  - brightstep 5y ago
    It does matter: wealth represents resources. Huge wealth inequality allocates resources, and therefore decisions of how to allocate those resources, into a small number of hands. Take Bezos' rocket and mega yacht. Is that a useful way to to apply the huge amount of materials and labor it took to create? What could we have done instead?
    - cloverich 5y ago
      To play devil's advocate, we could tax 100% of the wealth of those individuals which would cover the cost of another US invasion of Iraq.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      The sum cost of the worlds luxury projects like yachts or super mansions or personal jets etc is still a tiny fraction of the economy, taxes are a much bigger concern than those. And other than such projects the wealth of wealthy people are resources used wisely investing in production capabilities of products people want to buy, like new CPU generations or new warehouses etc. This is how most resources governed by the wealthy is allocated, which seems entirely reasonable, having a small fraction of that get lost to their personal whims seems like a very cheap price to pay for the efficiency of capitalism compared to other systems, we already pay like 40% in taxes, why not pay 1% or so tax to capitalism?
  - danbruc 5y ago
    No one can earn a billion. You only get that rich by being in the right position to siphon off money from the work of others. If you make a great inventions, its still the thousands of employees doing the actual work, you are just in the right position to take a bit from each and get really rich. If you invest your money, you are in the right position to set the terms, and you will choose terms that even after accounting for the risk and opportunity costs and so on some additional money ends up in your wallet. So even if everyone could live well because the amount of money siphoned away is not to much, there would still be some unfairness in the system that I would want to see go away.
    - kiba 5y ago
      Your income from jobs is never based on your moral worth, only what society thinks is monetarily valuable.
      - danbruc 5y ago
        I am not sure what you mean with moral worth, but of course no one will pay more than what they value something. If producing something does not pay the bills because no one values that thing, then you should not produce that thing.
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    If there were no arms races in our economy and no negative externalities to vast wealth (including power imbalances) then I would have no issue because there would not be negative effects on the lives of others. But the issue is that every billionaire mansion creates real waste. Real plastic in the ocean. Real strip mines. Real greenhouse gasses. The land they occupy is land others cannot occupy. And besides all that, they poison our discourse with media companies that are run at a loss and they lie to us with fake scientific studies.
- lstodd 5y ago
  The problem of having trillionaries in our spellchecker dictionaries? Seriously? I think we have quite more pressing problems than that right now.
pydry 5y ago
He's saying that this is a misleading figure because a lot of people have a lot of negative wealth. That's apparently supposed to ameliorate how bad this looks but as far as I can see it only serves to emphasize how bad the problem is.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  It’s not just that though. It’s also because a lot of people with $0 or subzero wealth have reasonable incomes, and a lot of people with a small but positive amount of wealth have very little income (China in particular). The overall well-being depends more on income including the imputed value of social services, not the stock of wealth. Wealth comparisons generally are fraught even besides this. The most valuable asset of the average human, by far, is their human capital. These and social services and purchasing power parities can be measured and compared for a more meaningful result, and highlight the truly poor, but this piece isn’t it. It’s just agitprop.
  - pydry 5y ago
    >The most valuable asset of the average human, by far, is their human capital Yes, and if you are a doctor saving lives with a high income and high negative wealth that human capital is being parasitically extracted via the rent you pay, via student loan repayments, via eye watering malpractice insurance rates and laundered via the financial system to make somebody else even richer. Dont you see how this makes it even worse? The greater wealth inequality grows the less you get to keep the output of your own human capital. And yea, maybe you can still do all of that and live a decent enough life. That isnt the point. This isnt a revolt against productivity. It's a revolt against parasites.
  - xg15 5y ago
    > The overall well-being depends more on income including the imputed value of social services, not the stock of wealth. That's an assumption that needs to be backed up. Many high-net worth individuals have almost zero nominal income - yet they are still extremely wealthy, enjoy a high standard of living and have significant influence. This can make income-only "wealth" statistics look a lot more balanced than the reality is. On the other hand, debt absolutely has an effect on your quality of living and the degree of freedom you have in your decisions. E.g., if someone barely manages to pay off a mortgage, they will have little disposable income for other expenses, such as medical emergencies - even though, on the face of it, they may have a decent middle-class income.
xg15 5y ago
I'm not convinced. The article makes a valid point that including debt into the statistics makes it harder to make comparisons between segments. But then it uses that point to claim that we should not attempt to make any comparisons at all because everyone is a unique snowflake etc etc: > The second lesson of this story is broader: that when you’re talking about poor people, aggregating wealth is a silly and ultimately pointless exercise. Some poor people have modest savings; some poor people are deeply in debt; some poor people have nothing at all. That seems like just muddying the waters to avoid some uncomfortable conclusions. By the way, buried in the center of the article, the author actually admids that the essence of the findings - highlighting the extreme wealth inequality - is correct: > Now $1.7 trillion is undoubtedly a lot of money: there is an astonishing amount of wealth inequality in the world, and it’s shocking that just 67 people are worth that much.

pinephoneguy 5y ago

There are many people who argue that the middle and working classes actually have less say in democracy (as opposed to say, monarchy) because the people at the top can easily afford to buy out all the media.

david-gpu 5y ago
> people at the top can easily afford to buy out all the media. Do autocracies have a history of freedom of the press? Can you think of many examples?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
  I think the point might be that democracies are like autocracies -- just with extra steps. The wealthy and powerful call the shots in all in political systems.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    In non democracies the powerful takes the wealth and are therefore wealthy. In democracies many powerful people are still not wealthy since they don't have the power to just take it, and the wealthiest persons are far from the most powerful ones since there is a limit to what money can buy, that is the main difference.
    - pinephoneguy 5y ago
      Many European states (some of the better ones) are still monarchies.
      - Jensson 5y ago
        They are still democracies, they just have some legacy celebrities they call King/Queen.
        5y ago

MaxMoney 5y ago

jonbrain 5y ago

discordance 5y ago
How absurd. It has only been like this in the last 10 - 20 years at most and this can easily change. It is not ‘life’.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- anm89 5y ago
  There are a HUGE number of historical counterfactuals to this. Musk and Bezos combined have about as much as Rockefeller had and that's just after accounting for inflation, not even considering the overall pie was much smaller then. Or look up Mansa Musa. so no, it hasn't "only been like this" for x amount of time. The world is less equal now than 50 years ago but drastically more equal than most of the rest of history.
  - choko 5y ago
    I think with the rise of FIAT based currency, you might have a hard time making a case that things are "less equal" than they were 50 years ago. Much of the wealth gap fear comes from a lack of understanding in how wealth is created resulting in zero-sum thinking.
hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
It is an economic system that humans set up and humans can change, it's not some fundamental property of life itself.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  One problem is that this pareto curve appears in every human political system ever, which lasts for a few decades or more. It looks to be inherent to human societies. When left unchallenged, the wealthy become the defacto oligarchs. Only the oppressively incompetent, lazy, and corruption-competition of representative democracies seem to slow it down. In the govt being so slow, oligarchs get little direct control in their lifetime. Additionally, public scrutiny of the ultra wealthy (say 10 men) is relatively manageable, further hindering the indirect control. Ofc, maybe this is just my wishful thinking.

bedhead 5y ago

The pie isn’t fixed. One man being rich doesn’t make another man poor.

pastacacioepepe 5y ago
And yet, that is what happens. How do you explain it?
- csee 5y ago
  You're conflating fiat, which is always zero sum when it changes hands in a transaction, with utility and value, which usually is positive sum. When I buy a phone, I am losing $500 to get something that cost $400 to make, and the phone company made $100. But I gained about $2000 worth of hidden value from that transaction because my life got way better and easier! That's why it wasn't zero sum and that's part of the explanation for wealth creation.
  - pastacacioepepe 5y ago
    You didn't really answer my question. I don't care if a market is a not a zero sum game or any other technicism. I want to know why if you think that a system that thrives on wealth inequality doesn't contribute to poverty, we see median househould incomes declining while all the prices are rising and a very small class of already rich people becomes ever richer.
    - kiba 5y ago
      We are seeing people hording land. These lands are not being given to developers and people who can make the best use of it, which are very likely to be other wealthy people. Instead of rewarding wealthy people for increasing the pie, we just give wealthy people free money for sitting on lands and having that appreciate, rather than selling it to someone who can use it. "Robust housing market" and rising price is not a good thing. It is a socioeconomic disaster. Another way we becomes poorer: Pattern of development that incentivize ownership of expensive items just to participate in society, like cars and roads.

juanani 5y ago

TheFreim 5y ago

The concerns people have with wealth concentration are often understandable and reasonable, but the way they're presented is often off-putting to me. I'd appreciate input on this matter from you all. For example, claims that "wealth inequality result in X deaths" seem clearly manipulative. It's not "inequality" of wealth, whatever that actually means, that kills them. If everyone had at least enough wealth to be physically and mentally healthy you could still have massive wealth inequality. Ergo, if wealth inequality can exist without the associated deaths then wealth inequality isn't the cause. Do you agree with my assessment? Why or why not?

pfortuny 5y ago
Totally. Lack of sanitation, food, etc… do cause deaths. Lack of equality is a fact of life. It cannot kill. Thanks. I agree with you totally.
impossiblefork 5y ago
It's, I think, more complicated than that. Lack of wealth is lack of power, and with a sufficient lack of wealth one has no power even over ones own living situation. That kind of thing is bad for people-- because they rent they have continuous uncertainty and can't change or build, which I think are human instincts which it costs something to suppress. Think of it as being restricted to working only on the production branch of a software project, where anythings done incorrectly has consequences for others.
kiba 5y ago
This is mostly a structural issue. The dollars amount that an individual has is basically a distraction. The wealthy has that much money in part because they don't have to compete with anyone else. This is especially true if you consider land, which are basically horded by the upper strata of society, and we allowed people to build wealth through property ownership rather than efficient use of land. You get strange words like "robust housing market" due to rising land price as if that's a good thing. Everyone who's looking to buy a home or rent get screwed by the market. Once you introduce competition and reward the wealthy for proper allocation not land hording, the stark inequality will likely be lower while the pie itself gets bigger.

consumer451 5y ago

I have heard Musk and others say that humans are not evolved for the onslaught of data and choice that the internet provides. I think the same could be true of having an extremely disproportionate amount of resources. Humans are just not evolved for that and it makes them behave strangely. The first symptom seems to be adopting a siege mentality. To be fair, even I have felt it a bit and my net worth is only a FAANG engineer’s yearly salary.

familymart 5y ago

temp8964 5y ago

How about power? Ten most powerful men have how many times of power of how many billions people? You don’t see that kind of report because power is difficult to quantify. Money maybe equivalent to power at some level, but Xi can easily make Jack Ma disappear. This means money means nothing in front of power. Power is obviously way more dangerous than money. And there’s way more inequality in power than in money.

newaccount2021 5y ago

aj_nikhil 5y ago

Strong labor laws are needed. The salary difference needs to be reduced.

choko 5y ago
Wealth is not based on salary. The difference comes from stocks and other illiquid wealth.
- pastacacioepepe 5y ago
  Salaries didn't increase at the same rate as productivity did. Until you fix this imbalance, you will have raising wealth inequality.
Hdhdndhhe 5y ago
Reduce it and the engineers will leave

dougmwne 5y ago

The methodology note contains the calculations for the statistics in this paper's talking points: https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621341/tb-inequality-kills-methodology-note-170122-en.pdf?sequence=24 https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...

verisimi 5y ago

Do we even know who the 10 richest men are? The wealthy are all using tax avoidance schemes and corporate structures to hide their wealth. I can certainly say, that if I was truly wealthy (and had the mindset to go with it) one of the first I would do is hide information on my wealth. Perhaps I'd even hire others to pretend to be wealthy, and take the flak, so I could go about my business. I'm sure billionaires/trillionaires would value their privacy at least as much as I do. And they've got the funds to buy it!

sva_ 5y ago

I sometimes wonder if the hoarding of wealth in some individuals/companies has a deflationary effect on currency.

nahuel0x 5y ago

Say what you want about Marx, but he was right when he postulated the capital tendency to concentration and centralization.

droro 5y ago

How to become a billionaire: 1. Start a company 2. Issue 1_000_000 shares to yourself 3. Find a friend who owes you a favor, then issue another share in the company and sell it to them for $1000 This is an extreme example, but most of the people on the world's richest list have been able to similarly inflate their net worth through illiquidity. Market caps are a misleading way to measure wealth. To take another example, the market cap of Tesla is based less on the company's physical assets than the anticipation of earnings over the next 20-30 years. My own net worth would look a lot better if it was calculated using the same methodology. I'm not trying to argue that inequality doesn't exist, but I think this obsession with the paper value of the 1-percenters is a distraction from the fact that reducing inequality needs to ultimately involve the redistribution of physical assets and labor. If we get obsessed with confiscating the abstract financial assets of billionaires, we will likely find out they don't have much buying power when being traded for real things like housing or energy.

xg15 5y ago
Agreed, except the aggregation of physical labor and assets is also not that simple. Many tech companies have very few assets on paper, yet nevertheless have an enormous amount of influence. I think in the end it comes back to comparing capital. Which sounds a bit familiar...
Aunche 5y ago
A YouTuber actually pulled off this stunt: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iHfJRON3b-w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iHfJRON3b-w
btdmaster 5y ago
Good point! Though, is it not true that these paper assets can be and are used to take out pseudo-gratis loans, hence in some sense they are real? Maybe the hypothetical billionaire is not worth that much, but the house he got against the paper wealth is definitely real and did not affect his financial power as much as it affects people buying it against 10% upfront.
stefan_ 5y ago
Well thankfully they have a bunch of suggestions if you were to just bother reading past the headline instead of nitpicking it to death with an imaginary scenario that does not apply to any of the 10 mentioned.

weatherlight 5y ago

The Roman republic fell for many reasons, one of the big reasons was Augustus Caesar controlled much of the world's most powerful states, including Egypt. This level of wealth today would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 trillion dollars or 40 times richer than Jeff Bezos. This fortune was so vast that Augustus was able to pay to recruit, train, and upkeep the entire Roman military- all 60 legions- alone. In addition, he was able to fund multiple grand building projects, massive political reforms, and keep a tidy fortune for himself and his heirs. Augustus became the Defacto state. These are rough numbers because currency conversion across 2 millennia is impossible. Augustus was worth at least 1/3 of the Roman Empires' total GDP. This means of every 3 dollars in the Roman Economy 1 dollar was Augustus’. Wealth concentration disrupts society and makes society susceptible autocratic holders of wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus#First_settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus#First_settlement https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Augustus https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Augustus

yboris 5y ago

A more-detailed look at inequality across the world can be seen through this interactive visualization I created: https://income-inequality.info/ https://income-inequality.info/ Comparing income distributions within countries and between countries in increments of 5% of the population in one unified graph. You can re-run the calculations yourself https://github.com/whyboris/income-inequality.info https://github.com/whyboris/income-inequality.info & https://github.com/whyboris/Global-Income-Distribution https://github.com/whyboris/Global-Income-Distribution

6510 5y ago
the income graph is far less "comical" than the wealth graph: https://www.lcurve.org https://www.lcurve.org

Const-me 5y ago

I don’t think it’s possible to fix wealth inequality in any reasonable way. Here’s a trivially simple numeric simulation of zero-sum economy of 100k people: https://gist.github.com/Const-me/4b9b4372ba37c03feaf2f1475b10845e https://gist.github.com/Const-me/4b9b4372ba37c03feaf2f1475b1... Typical output: 10%: $10 20%: $20 Median: $70 80%: $165 90%: $235 99%: $475 99.9%: $705 Top 10 list: $1280, $1255, $1245, $1070, $1020, $1010, $1005, $995, $990, $965 So, after starting with $100 / each and doing large count of absolutely fair random transactions, we arrived at 10% of poorest people have less than $10, the median is $70, and the wealthiest person having almost 13x the initial amount. I hope no one is going to accuse the random number generator of being rigged by capitalists at Microsoft. That’s simply how the math works. Wealth inequality is natural. The real socio-economical issue is poverty, not wealth inequality.

juancn 5y ago

I don't get the expectation of justice here (from a purely analytic point of view). Power laws are pervasive across pretty much anything you look at. Why would wealth would be different? I understand the feeling of "it's not fair" (especially if you got the short end of the stick), but really, what is really fair other than random chance? It's quite hard to correct for an emergent phenomenon, I mean, something that seems to be a statistical property of the collective behavior of a large group of entities. Changing anything will have unintended consequences, since it's very difficult to predict the effects (as of why is this, I think non-linearity plays a big part, but that's a longer topic). My suspicion is that the middle-ages originated worldviews of western society are shifting now. Oversimplifying, there are two worldviews that come from religion in western cultures as far as I can tell. Catholic based worldviews, view poverty as a virtue, wealth as a sin (think Latin America). On the other hand protestant worldviews tend to think wealth is a sign of being good morally (US, UK, and some european countries). Lately, there's a shift in these, with the first one slowly showing its face in classically protestant countries, and a radicalization of the "poverty is good" view in historically catholic countries. As to why this is happening, it could be just a consequence of increased communication (i.e. everyone can voice an opinion online/see what's really going on far away) or something better organized.

moistly 5y ago

Maybe one should phrase it as “Ten most powerful men have more power than the least-powerful 3.1B people.” Money is power in this world as it currently works.