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It sounds like a damning indictment of capitalism until you read the part where it says that there are only 15 of them in the entire world.

dataflow 3y ago
I mean, what's the takeaway in your mind? If there was 1 person in the whole world that owned half its wealth, would you find it un-damning because it's just 1 person?
- joegibbs 3y ago
  If the problem is that there aren't enough self-made billionaires, it's bad journalism to take an arbitrary slice of 15 out of 2700 of them and act as if they're representative of the problem. We could redistribute their wealth and everyone in the world would maybe get a couple of dollars. I think if someone wants to make a point about whether billionaires are self-made or not, they should look at a more representative sample.
  - dataflow 3y ago
    > If the problem is that there aren't enough self-made billionaires [...] It should be obvious the problem they have is with too many non-self-made billionaires. Not too few self-made ones.
  - dangus 3y ago
    > We could redistribute their wealth and everyone in the world would maybe get a couple of dollars. We often think of the wealth redistribution of billionaires as a liquidation exercise, but there are so many other methods of ensuring income equality that have nothing to do with that particular thought exercise. The businesses could be broken up, they could be partially or fully surrendered to employee ownership, they could be forced to operate in certain ways, they could have different wage/equity requirements compared to non-oligopoly businesses. The options are endless. Heck, we could just tax net worth to effectively force divestment.
paxys 3y ago
It's pointless to even try and calculate this number. There are ~3000 billionaires in the world. Most/all of them have children, and I'd wager a large chunk of these children have access to >$1B of the wealth, whether on paper or not. The only special thing about these 15 is that their parents are dead and/or their inheritance or trust fund has already kicked in.
PM_me_your_math 3y ago
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dataflow 3y ago

I mean, what's the takeaway in your mind? If there was 1 person in the whole world that owned half its wealth, would you find it un-damning because it's just 1 person?

joegibbs 3y ago
If the problem is that there aren't enough self-made billionaires, it's bad journalism to take an arbitrary slice of 15 out of 2700 of them and act as if they're representative of the problem. We could redistribute their wealth and everyone in the world would maybe get a couple of dollars. I think if someone wants to make a point about whether billionaires are self-made or not, they should look at a more representative sample.
- dataflow 3y ago
  > If the problem is that there aren't enough self-made billionaires [...] It should be obvious the problem they have is with too many non-self-made billionaires. Not too few self-made ones.
- dangus 3y ago
  > We could redistribute their wealth and everyone in the world would maybe get a couple of dollars. We often think of the wealth redistribution of billionaires as a liquidation exercise, but there are so many other methods of ensuring income equality that have nothing to do with that particular thought exercise. The businesses could be broken up, they could be partially or fully surrendered to employee ownership, they could be forced to operate in certain ways, they could have different wage/equity requirements compared to non-oligopoly businesses. The options are endless. Heck, we could just tax net worth to effectively force divestment.

paxys 3y ago

It's pointless to even try and calculate this number. There are ~3000 billionaires in the world. Most/all of them have children, and I'd wager a large chunk of these children have access to >$1B of the wealth, whether on paper or not. The only special thing about these 15 is that their parents are dead and/or their inheritance or trust fund has already kicked in.

PM_me_your_math 3y ago

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