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62 People own the same as half the world, reveals Oxfam Davos report (2016)
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago(2016)
- buro9 4y agoThen try this one https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-double-their-fortunes-pandemic-while-incomes-99-percent-humanity https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-doub... from earlier this year. The headline has only become more true, the number of people who now own the same as half the world is likely fewer and who those people are remain the same (Forbes billionaire list is the source for the research).
- edf13 4y agoThis is a startling fact: > A one-off 99 percent tax on the ten richest men’s pandemic windfalls, for example, could pay: to make enough vaccines for the world; to provide universal healthcare and social protection, fund climate adaptation and reduce gender-based violence in over 80 countries; All this, while still leaving these men $8 billion better off than they were before the pandemic.
- robertlagrant 4y agoIt's not a fact. They don't have that money in cash. It's mostly based on shares in their companies. If you take those shares, who's going to buy them, given you'll probably just take them again.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoIf you distribute them widely why would that happen? You could even give them to the people who actually work in the business and their suppliers and their suppliers suppliers etc. to make it "fair". Wouldn't want people's hard work to be stolen from them.
- robertlagrant 4y ago1) What's the point in giving them shares that no one will buy? 2) Did you read the parent comment? They were saying to take this "money" and pay for all vaccinations with it.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoYeah, they were talking about a windfall tax for coronavirus. You were saying they couldn't do that because of shares. I was saying the shares could be redistributed directly. You seem to have decided that the shares can't be sold or transferred (and then sold) but I'm not sure why you made that leap.
- robertlagrant 4y agoAs I understand it, it's not a windfall tax. That $8bn is not cash. It's the ownership of their businesses. My point is the government steals 95% of the business, and then what? Who would buy those shares to turn them into cash to spend on vaccinations (or whatever else)? Why would anyone buy shares that the government can take from them? In your example of taking shares and giving them to other people, why would anyone buy them from the people they were given to? Why buy what the government will just take and give you?
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoBecause a windfall tax is a sensible and boring idea that has been applied in even right-wing capitalist societies with success and general approval, not a slippery slope into totalitarian communism? It doesn't matter if the windfall is a stack of cash, or an appreciating asset. It's the fact that you got richer without doing anything to earn it that makes it a windfall.
- robertlagrant 4y ago> Because a windfall tax is a sensible and boring idea that has been applied in even right-wing capitalist societies with success and general approval, not a slippery slope into totalitarian communism? This isn't relevant. Only how it works is. > It doesn't matter if the windfall is a stack of cash, or an appreciating asset Can you elaborate on how a windfall tax on an asset works? An example might help.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoI wasn't suggesting it had changed, just that I got a couple of paragraphs in and got confused when they said the prediction had come true a year early in 2015, and it's generally a trend to mark older stories with the year as the assumption is they are newly published.
- makomk 4y agoThe sneaky, dishonest trick that articles like that one use is that although share prices - and with them the wealth of the worlds' richest - dropped massively when the pandemic hit, this mostly happened before it was officially declared a pandemic and before everyone started taking a hit to their income from it. In general the stock market is a leading indicator that reflects what the actual economy that makes stuff and pays people's wages is expected to be like over the next few years. So articles like this are measuring from the bottom of the pandemic dip and pretending that it's new wealth that the richest have gotten, and also taking advantage of that time delay to make it seem like they're benefiting from the rest of us getting poorer when in reality it caused a massive drop in their wealth.
- jonathanstrange 4y agoWhile we're at this topic, does anybody know the Gini index of the world?
- JBiserkov 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#World_income_Gini_index_since_1800s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#World_income_...
- hnbad 4y agoProbably hard to aggregate given that the data isn't available for every country and not continuous: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?gt= https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?gt= But trend in the US and Germany has been steady growth. For those unaware: the Gini index ranges from 0 to 1 (or 0% to 100%) with 0 being total wealth equality and 1 being total inequality.
- kleiba 4y agoThe report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of the current ‘62’, 53 are men and just nine are women. I don't think that you can claim that the part before the hyphen follows from the part after the hyphen.
- lostlogin 4y agoEquality: the fact of being equal in rights, status, advantages, etc. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/equality?q=Equality https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
- xupybd 4y agoMen tend to occupy the extremes of society more than women. The good and the bad.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoThere's a theory that men are more extreme in many ways, so you'd expect them to be overrepresented at both the top and the bottom. This mostly seems to get used to excuse obvious sexism, when it could be spun the other way, women may be the safe choice and we should expect some men to be poor and useless and there's nothing we can do to help them. In this specific case, I think the commenter is technically correct, but also wrong on the big picture.
- xupybd 4y agoThe worlds top 62 richest are all outliers. Little can be drawn from them that represents the general population. As men are distributed more to the extremes you'd expect to see more men here. This excuses nothing and explains nothing.
- kleiba 4y agoI don't understand you last sentence. How exactly am I wrong on the big picture in my original post?
- synu 4y agoThis seems unsustainable to say the least.
- Jensson 4y agoYou own more than a quarter of the world using the same rhetoric. They include people with negative wealth in the bottom half, you don't have to go that low until the total sum of everyone there starts going negative.
- smt88 4y agoIn countries with the concept of welfare and bankruptcy, "negative wealth" is impossible. Even 0 wealth is impossible because there is a value to the welfare cashflow that the person is eligible for.
- robertlagrant 4y agoRight - a fresh out of med school graduate is worth negative a lot, due to debt, but has great earning potential over their lifetime.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoI think this is a confounding factor in national analysis of income, but can't see it being much of a factor in global wealth terms.
- Ekaros 4y agoDepends quite a lot of what the "own" means and what "half the world" means. If we are talking about stocks, it might be meaningless, if real-estate, land and so on it is way too much.
- rakoo 4y agoOwning stock earns you money, which is very tangible. It is money taken from the labour of workers, and thus not going to them, and is the main way already rich non-working people can still buy whatever they want. It is far from meaningless.
- koliber 4y agoThis was published in 2016. I wonder what it looks like right now, and in the years since 2016.
- nxpnsv 4y agoapparently 8 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33005679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33005679
- siliconunit 4y agoJust wait for the trickle down...
- thomasfl 4y agoDoes this mean that in just a few years, about 10 people would actually own most of the world?
- zwirbl 4y agohttps://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/just-8-men-own-same-... It was 8 people in 2017, a year after the posted article
- adg001 4y agoThanks for sharing. These data date back to 2016. In the following years, Oxfam updated the report where they found this inequality to be further exacerbated: "Just 8 men own same wealth as half the world" [0, 1]. [0] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/just-8-men-own-same-... [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-billionaires-have-more-wealth-46-billion-people https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-billionaires-...
- divbzero 4y agoThese were the 8 men: 1. Bill Gates (Microsoft) 2. Amancio Ortega (Inditex) 3. Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) 4. Carlos Slim (América Móvil, Grupo Carso) 5. Jeff Bezos (Amazon) 6. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) 7. Larry Ellison (Oracle) 8. Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg LP) Their wealth totaled $426 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World's_Billionaires#2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World's_Billionaires#2016
- adg001 4y agoThis is all very interesting, thanks for sharing. While I am not familiar at all with such degree of wealth, the first thing I noticed while looking at this list is the absence of personalities from other regions of the globe, such as the MENA and Asia. I appreciate the histories and relevance of the people listed here, but I am reminded, at the same time, that the wealth of other key people is not fully understood and ascertained, due to a lack transparency – MBS and Putin come to my mind, among others. In a way this is the documented wealth, which is anyway key to understand the world we live in.
- hef19898 4y agoTransparency, all of these people get the majority of their wealth from ownership of public companies. So it is easy to estimate their overall wealth.
- kcatskcolbdi 4y agoConsidering this is based off Forbes list, and Forbes has Peter Thiel's net worth at ~1\5th the amount that's confirmed to be in his backdoor IRA, I doubt the accuracy.
- tenpies 4y agoIt is a huge flaw since it is notoriously opaque and leans towards public company shareholders. Another easy example is that they completely miss the mind-boggingly wealthy like Queen Elizabeth II who was at the time the largest land owner on the planet and her wealth would lap everyone on that list. She was also a woman so they wouldn't get to complain about sexism in wealth distributions nearly as much.
- gsatic 4y agoBy which year can we bring it down to one? Probably a higher chance of speeding up that process than doing anything else. After which reboot should be easier.
- lawrencechen 4y agoThe average person is nevertheless still better off than they were in all of history. Once basic needs are met (and tbh far exceeded in most first world countries), it seems that awareness about inequality only makes people less happy.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoWhen talking about inequality, median is more appropriate than average. And even if the median is higher, there's some psychology in whether that actually feels better in a chimp brain hierarchy. And, the implicit argument that inequality is required or helps the progress in the average or median is usually implied but not supported.
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- pygy_ 4y agoThe economic power imbalance is still problematic. Free trade and supply/demand were supposed to be a way to decentralize economic decisions, but they lead in practice to inequality and a situation where we have an economy that's planned by the wealthy for their own benefit (see planned obsolescence, predatory marketing practices, dark UI patterns, the privatization of justice through arbitration, lobbying, ...).
- badcppdev 4y agoIf the average person has a good life then hooray that's great. Also irrelevant. Let's move on to the bottom of the heap. The people starving to death for numerous reasons. The 62 people at the top are probably not responsible for the hundreds of millions of humans in poverty but they sit on top of a system that has been tuned over many centuries to make rich people richer. I have no objections to billionaires but I want the rules changed so that earning a 100 million dollars is as hard for a billionaire as it is for a millionaire or just a person starting from scratch. I'm not quite sure what the rules would be but it'd be interesting to engineer that level playing field.
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- mariogintili 4y agothis is why taxation is theft
- lpolovets 4y agoThis statistic is a pet peeve of mine because it's so misleading. 1) Something like 30-40% of people in the world have a negative net worth. For example: if you graduate college with loans, your net worth is negative. That means anyone with a positive net worth has a higher net worth than 30-40% of the world combined. But that is a meaningless fact. 2) This doesn't take other factors into account, like local cost of living. For example, someone with $100k in one country might be relatively wealthier than someone with $1m in another country. But if the first country has 10 people with $100k and the second country had one person with $1m, the Davos Report claim would sound the same.
- rightbyte 4y agoYou would want liquidity as a measure too. Or like, dollars spent per year, or something.
- d--b 4y agoSadly, those statistics lose their punch over the years. They even have an opposite effect to what they intended to provoke. Instead of outraging the centrists, and provoke a move to regulate extreme wealth, they infuriate the more liberals who respond with: "why not?". And the answer to "why not?" is necessarily idealogical, which means it cannot be debated.
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- vishnugupta 4y agoI've been hearing/reading all these for a while; the attention went up a notch post 2008 financial crisis, more so after the bailouts. As much as I'm disturbed by these numbers, I'm beginning to wonder if the attention is all just a waste. Like just see what happened during 2020 lockdowns? Rich got more richer (at least in India), and then in 2021 the searing inflation hit the middle and lower class the most; and now the fed is raising rates leading to job loss of, again middle/lower class. Also, the energy crisis in EU is hurting small/medium businesses the most. I don't know; maybe it's better to focus on institutions and structures that lead to this inequality rather than directly attacking the rich by drawing attention to these inequality numbers. Instead of these numbers why don't we figure out what lead to that inequality in the first place? How do we prevent rich from converting their money to power through lobbying, and funding politicians? How do we help the lower income group through free education, and housing? I for once really liked the recent student debt (partial) cancellation/reduction program in the US. Though I have absolutely no horse in this as I don't even live in the US; I'm glad that (ex) students' debt burden is being reduced.
- noobermin 4y agoThat is the real means to change society, through its institutions, or creating new ones (unions, interest groups, etc) that can challenge the existing institutions. Killing a rich man won't do much, especially if he has a will. The point of interest is the system that creates a strong power law distribution in the first place.
- makomk 4y agoThe energy crisis has also taken big chunks out of the wealth of super-rich people whose wealth is not in the energy industry. For example it looks like Bloomberg's Billionaires Index is estimating that Bezos (#2 wealthiest) lost 28% of his wealth since the start of the year, the chairman of Louis Vutton lost 30%, and Bill Gates (#5) and Warren Buffett (#6) lost 24% and 14% despite being well diversified. The thing is that on the way down all the headlines are about the cost to ordinary people and none mention the effects on the wealthy, whilst on the way up the headlines are about the gains for the wealthy and any benefits to ordinary people go almost unnoticed.
- jonnypotty 4y agoThe person writing this article is almost definitely part of the 1%. Who cares what gender the 62 richest people in the world are; these people cannot be the victims of inequality. What evidence is presented here that says "if rich people earnt less then poor people would earn more" which is the obvious inference. It is intuitive but is it true? If rich people pay more tax this doesn't get given to poor people as wages, so how does the tax question relate to the poverty issue? I agree that more tax revenue is good as it pays for better public services but there isn't any talk of 'wealth' provided by public services being part of the discussion.
- netsharc 4y agoMore tax revenue could mean more/better public transport and less pot holes on roads, so a "poor" person doesn't have to buy/maintain a car or spend their time walking to/from work[1]. They can use the money not spent on a car on other things they need/want, spend the time more productively at work to earn more money, at home to learn some new skill, or heck, even spend time with their kids and help them grow up to be productive members of society. But well, many think: OMG, spending tax money on public utilities!?! That's Unamerican! Spending time with kids? That's commie socialist talk! [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=man+walks+work+got+gifted+a+car https://www.google.com/search?q=man+walks+work+got+gifted+a+... - incredibly there are several different people here, and there are probably a lot more who aren't getting gifted cars.
- necovek 4y ago> could I think the GP was making a note about exactly this: it could, but will it? What evidence is there that keeping equality at the same level for the uber-rich would have resulted in higher standard for the poor? It could have translated to the second 49% still leaving the bottom 50% in the gutters. In all likelihood, the result would have been quite similar to what has already happened: slightly larger gains for the poorest, but most of the gains would be in the middle and higher classes. Nothing to be sneezed at, but hardly a substantive change, yet with the risk that some of those investments in jobs would be gone too.
- bluetomcat 4y agoWhat do these 62 people "own"? Probably stocks, luxurious real estate that's very expensive but probably doesn't occupy huge swathes of land, collectibles and some spare cash. What's more disturbing is the decision-making power they possess, both through their companies and through their connections with policy makers. They can influence the media with their "investment plans" and grand visions, they can lobby for their undertakings against the general interest of the population, essentially undermining democracy.
- oersted 4y agoThey don't have it in cash under the mattress though, or as yachts and mansions. Let me preface by saying that I do not think that having such inequality is in any way good. But there is a widespread misunderstanding of what being rich means, their wealth is not calculated like normal people's wealth (bank account, house, car, job security...). Most of the wealth of the richest people in the world is in the form of investments. This wealth is not liquid and is largely under the control of other individuals. It is used to help start, expand or rescue valuable companies and pay salaries. Often this money subsidies lots of consumer products that are sold at a loss and benefit the population (Uber and Twitter have almost never been profitable for instance, even if their value is debatable). Yes they do "own" it in the sense that they have the rights to future profits, and they can exchange these rights with other investors for cash to a limited degree. But in practice the vast majority of their wealth is in circulation benefiting many others, and they can't take it out of circulation without loosing most of it (so are they even that rich?). And yes, most of this wealth is speculative too (potential of future profits), it's more like a probability of future wealth. They can take some loans against this speculative wealth to have cash at hand, but they do need to pay for the extra risk involved. However, even if the cannot use most of their wealth to buy luxury, they do have significant power in the sense that they can choose who to help with their wealth. They are forced to help many other people (investment), but they do not tend to provide the help that society most needs (mostly because individual consumers don't tend to want what society at large most needs).
- LatteLazy 4y agoModern economies are capital intensive. So you need a big pool of capital to make them work. You can't get that from normal people, because they prefer to spend 110% of their incomes and live on EZ credit (so they are a capital sink, not a source). You can't get it from governments because people keep voting for unfunded tax cuts and services (so another capital sink instead of source). So the economy is desperate for what billionaires offer: capital. So they get rewarded accordingly. And if you tax them or abolish them, the economy will suffer enormously. People whine about "the 1%" (really the 0.00001%) but they are a natural consequence of the way we choose (individually and collectively) to live. Don't like this inequality? Spend less than your income, pay off you debts, consume less, produce more, invest, vote for higher taxes and less spending - eliminate the NEED for the super rich.
- karmakaze 4y agoThis seems to be saying that these 62 people own so much, but the other view is that half the world owns so little. Both are true but to what degrees? What's missing here is how much does the other half that includes these 62 own? It's hard to get a picture of it when were only shown two numbers representing pie pieces--how big is the pie?