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Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds
- kjkjadksj 10mo agoI figured it would be more honestly
- mcny 10mo agoHalf of humanity is a lot of people though.
- kingstnap 10mo agoA lot of people own nothing or are in net debt though and all of those would get included in the bottom 50%. Plus there is a strong "property of how you measure wealth" effect going into this. Specifically here we are largely comparing stuff like basic items as wealth for the bottom 50% and for the top 0.01% we are measuring stocks/crypto owned * market price which is a synthetic measure and can sort of balloon arbitrarily. It would be more interesting to see things like the inequality of true apples to apples things like vehicles, land owned, fuel used, electricity used, etc. An interesting apples to apples one is to see how inequal views on social media are. Which have a massive concentration effect as well. Then you could measure how much we are funneling resources and attention on different categories.
- homeless_engi 10mo agoThat is 56,000 people
- mcny 10mo agoI think it would be interesting to see where these 56k people live.
- ed_mercer 10mo agoAnd whether they use dial-up modem
- lanna 10mo agoWouldn't 0.001% be 82,600?
- close04 10mo agoIt's fewer than 60.000 people according to the article. Compared to the world's population, it's a decent approximation and rounding to 0.001%.
- newsclues 10mo agoThe .001% is the new 1%.
- whatsupdog 10mo agoActually 0.01% was the new 1% after Bernie Sanders made a couple million and hit the top 0.1%
- newsclues 10mo agoI was amused by his flip from decrying the millionaires to the billionaires as his personal wealth grew.
- ultrablack 10mo agoCool!
- hengheng 10mo agoEd Zitron Voice: Is that good?
- simianwords 10mo agoThis is misleading. It counts debt as negative. This means a person who has zero wealth and zero debt will have more wealth than bottom 5% of people cumulatively (their wealth cancels out due to debt). It would be misleading to suggest that a single person with zero wealth has more wealth than 100k people’s wealth combined. But that’s what this headline and report are doing.
- baq 10mo agoHow else to do it? Don't count debt at all and pretend that if you've borrowed money, you're rich? Calculate EV of that debt - but how and on what timeframe?
- simianwords 10mo agoLet’s first agree that it’s misleading. A new born baby has more wealth than bottom 1 million peoples wealth cumulatively according to this metric. That’s ridiculous.
- anal_reactor 10mo agoTime is money, and newborn baby has shitload of time.
- bdangubic 10mo agoPerfect answer!
- Jensson 10mo agoCounting debt makes the poorest person in the world being richer than the poorest 1% combined. That is ridiculous to say, because we intuitively don't read that with negative wealth in mind so you create these very misleading headlines.
- mytailorisrich 10mo agoIt's not misleading, in fact it's how accounting/balance sheets work. A new born baby with zero asset and zero liability has thus a net financial worth of 0, which is obviously more than someone indebted.
- johntennessee93 10mo ago[flagged]
- eldgfipo 10mo agoplease don't
- johntennessee93 10mo agoDon't what? If most people had money, they'd waste it on clothes, cars and other frivolous purchases. Most billionaires made their wealth because they were effective at using that wealth for productive uses. Elon could have cashed out after PayPal, instead he revolutionized rocketry and electric vehicles. He deserves every cent of his wealth.
- throwaway77385 10mo agoThis is the 'ends justify the means' argument. No matter how ruthlessly power / money was accumulated by a person, the fact that they somehow did it, justifies it. It's undeniable that some progress happened thanks to Elon, but people like him can't stay in their lane and immediately assume they are demi-gods capable of doing anything. They start reshaping the world according to their psychotic beliefs and ultimately make all of us worse off. Unchecked power is not and will never be a good thing.
- johntennessee93 10mo ago>No matter how ruthlessly power / money was accumulated by a person, the fact that they somehow did it, justifies it. Elon ruthlessly created reusable rockets, satellite internet and electric cars. >It's undeniable that some progress happened thanks to Elon, but people like him can't stay in their lane and immediately assume they are demi-gods capable of doing anything. If Elon's ego causes him to make increasingly bad investments, capitalism will automatically assign his wealth to people who can make better use of it. >Unchecked power is not and will never be a good thing. Elon doesn't have unchecked power in any capacity, he follows laws like everyone else. His pay package was struck down by a judge despite the shareholders wanting it.
- docdeek 10mo agoFTA: The authoritative World Inequality Report 2026, based on data compiled by 200 researchers, also found that the top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90% combined, while the poorest half captures less than 10% of total global earnings. The report puts the threshold for being in the top 10% of income earners at €65.5K. I suspect many HN users would fall into this category. Related: is there a way to estimate what the wealth inequality was like pre-industrial revolution? It occured to me that in an era of kings, queens, aristocrats, and nobles it might be similar to what we see today. Without concluding whether it is right or wrong, would it have been very different for the bottom 90% in terms of inequality? Is it just the ‘who’ that makes up the very top of the wealth and income charts that is different?
- apexalpha 10mo ago>The report puts the threshold for being in the top 10% of income earners at €65.5K. I suspect many HN users would fall into this category. Per person or per household? In any case this does change the conversation a bit...
- myrmidon 10mo agoI think a very problematic aspect of this is self-perception. People that see (growing) wealth inequality as a problem rarely perceive themselves as part of it, but e.g. anyone complaining about the "top 1%" on this forum is pretty likely to be part of the "problem" themselves, globally speaking. I think that for a lot of issues "people richer than us" are mostly a convenient scapegoat to shift the blame upstream, e.g. with CO2 emissions: If you're an average "western" citizen, then you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability, and pointing at celebrities and their private jets or somesuch is no better than thinly veiled whataboutism in my view.
- benterix 10mo ago> you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability Since you are talking about culpability specifically, what exactly can they do about it? Or, more to the point, what have they done so that it it is their fault?
- myrmidon 10mo agoVote political parties into power that put a price on emissions and honestly work on reducing it. The big problem is that this is not gonna be free. When fossils are used, it's obviously because they are the most economical option. As soon as you price in actual externalities (=> climate change), energy is going to get more expensive, and people don't like this. Almost everyone claims to be concerned about climate change, but a lot of people are neither willing to pay more for gas or power, nor do they want to risk making local industry less competitive. The sad truth is that almost any cost for environmental sustainability/emission reduction is already too much for a lot of people.
- Gys 10mo agoTaxing them will be difficult. There will always be places welcoming them with low taxes if they just spend money. Most of their wealth is probably in companies operating globally. It seems more easy to tax profits in local markets. And increase competition…
- willvarfar 10mo agoIs there a global movement to tax business where the customer conducts it rather than where the company chooses to base itself?
- Gys 10mo agoIt is a topic in the EU. France and Italy, IIRC, want to make this policy. I also found this https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/11/european-parliament-targets-big-tech-with-new-cross-border-tax/ https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/11/european-parliament-target...
- dns_snek 10mo agoLet them. Individuals can move but they can't take their properties or companies with them (in any real sense, they can take a piece of paper with their name on it).
- simianwords 10mo agoI did some quick math: the top .001% consumes as much as bottom 3% of Americans cumulatively. It’s high but it gives an accurate picture of how bad the real problem is.
- willvarfar 10mo agoWhen you say "Americans" do you mean people in the USA? Or the continents? Beyond the wealth inequality within countries, there is the wealth inequalities between countries which drives migration of people or jobs etc. Even the most closed off and isolationist country in the world - probably North Korea? - is not immune to relative wealth on the global stage.
- simianwords 10mo agoMy calculations were all within USA only. Wealth inequality within countries again is solved elegantly within capitalism. Ignoring North Korea for now - India being poor has the advantage of labour that asks for very less wages so outsourcing is a natural strategy for companies in USA. Beyond that imf loans and other means exist. North Korea choosing to be isolationalist is doing it at its own peril.
- Jensson 10mo agoDo you count government aid like healthcare and school? The bottom 3% of Americans consume quite a lot if you count everything throughout their lives.
- pzo 10mo ago> Data from World Inequality Report also showed top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90% I mean that's definition of top 10% that top 10% is better than other 90%. Journalists should prove read titles before submitting
- simianwords 10mo agoI think it means they earn more cumulatively? Still a bit strange wording.
- jiriknesl 10mo agoAs always, it takes into account only a subset of what constitutes wealth. The state owns national parks, army equipment, buildings... Also, the state owns an impact on regulated companies, subsidies, etc. Just the US army receives funding about $1 trillion a year. It must own equipment, weapons, and buildings in a value of many trillions. Every single citizen has a share in all of what the state owns and controls. The state also partially controls the wealth of billionaires. So I suppose, that the top 0.001% holds as much value as... the bottom 5%?
- pil0u 10mo agoThe real gods of humanity. How would you call them differently? The amount of power that wealth gives them over "us" is unfathomable. We often contemplate history with lofty detachment, thinking how far we have come as humans and societies. Kings and queens seen as ancient fictions. Sure some KPIs like life expectancy/comfort improved thanks to technologies and progress. I don't deny all that, but that's not my point. The extreme majority of humans are still vessels/subjects to an absurd minority of other humans. How can't we see that as a failure?
- simianwords 10mo agoRich people having too much wealth is not necessarily that bad a thing because most of the investment is in productive companies. It’s not like they are using their wealth on frivolous consumption. Which means redistribution would only change who controls the investment and not the actual consumption patterns of people. Implication is that poor people will consume the same as before after redistribution with perhaps some extra assets. So nothing materially changes other than some security. Poor people will continue to consume the same as before. Bigger problem is it’s not so clear that redistribution is necessarily a good thing because I feel the people who made money are more likely to make better decisions on their own companies. I don’t know how companies would fare if for example Amazon were redistributed and run like some public company. (Posting again)
- ajuc 10mo agoThe problem is oligarchy not inefficiencies. In the absence of regulation, with these levels of inequality - democracy becomes a facade. Whatever the few oligarchs want - happens, no matter if people like it or not. And yes, redistribution is one solution, and it does work. You just have to repeat it regularly. There are also other solutions - like strong regulations on influencing public opinion/legislation with "lobbying", propaganda, media ownership and ethical journalism etc. For one example - USA has neither regulation nor redistribution - so it became an oligarchy.
- simianwords 10mo agoHow does redistribution solve material problems with the poor? My post says exactly that it is zero sum - you have to take away investments in big companies and drive it into perhaps unproductive places. It’s not so clear that this is a good thing.
- ajuc 10mo ago1. It isn't 0-sum (see the effect of Henry Ford paying his workers more for 1 obvious example). 2. But that's irrelevant, because the reason some people are poor is not lack of resources in the whole economy. We have way more stuff than we need even if it was 0-sum 3. Also I wasn't even talking about eliminating poor people, I was talking about ensuring poor people have a say in what the society does.
- adrian_b 10mo agoI would not care at all if 1 ppm of the world population would hold 100 times the wealth of the poorest half of the world population, if all of the poorest half would have nonetheless the means to produce their minimum necessities in energy, food, clothes etc., independently of others, so that their survival for the next months or weeks or even days would not be completely dependent on the benevolence of the rich to create places where they must be employed in order to be able to survive. A half of century ago, my grandparents were still relatively independent of the rest of the world, because they owned a house and some cultivated land, so even if their normal sources of revenue would have disappeared by becoming jobless, they could have still lived quite decently being sustained only by what they were producing in their garden and by their animals. They also did not depend on external services for things like water supply, garbage disposal or heating. They used electricity, but they had plenty of space so that today one could have used there enough solar panels to be also independent of external energy sources. On the other hand, now I am living in a big city and I absolutely need a salary if I want to continue to live. Where I live there are no salaries for an engineer or programmer that are big enough so that one could ever buy a place like that owned by my grandparents. I do not believe that this extreme dependency between employees and employers that has become more and more widespread during the last century will lead to anything good. There are a lot of important technical problems that must be solved in order to ensure the survival of humanity, but the research to solve them is almost non-existent, because those who control the money are too short-sighted so they invest only according to various fads in research that will produce things of negligible benefit for most humans. The unsolved problems that have accumulated are such that only an effort of the kind that happened in the research done during World War II would solve them, but it seems unlikely that something like that will ever repeat.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- quelsolaar 10mo agoThis, "If you have enough, why does it matter if someone else has more" argument doesn't really hold. Yes we can make more TVs and phones so that everyone can get one, but then get to things like centrally located housing, where there is a limited supply. It matters a lot if you want someplace to live, and there are thousands of very rich people trying to out bid one and other for the same space in your city. This is why housing is no longer affordable.
- metalman 10mo agoput another way, a rounding error of people, owns everything. not good.
- pzo 10mo agoI think also we cannot measure wealth in GDP or even by salary. Someone who earns $2k e.g. in vietnam and lives in Danang will have better quality of life than someone who earns $4k and lives in SF.
- mytailorisrich 10mo ago> a report that argues global inequality has reached such extremes that urgent action has become essential. This is always stated like if that was an obvious fact that somehow "action is needed" against the richest, but is it? Does it matter that a few individuals are multi-billionaires (usually because of the notional value of shares they own)? I would say that it does not. What matters is how the majority and the poorest are faring, which is orthogonal.
- tock 10mo agoSo are citizens of rich countries willing to send their wealth to poor countries? We need global wealth redistribution to fix this right?
- brap 10mo agoCitizens of those same rich countries will often say with a straight face that rich people need to pay more to support the poor. How about rich counties paying more to support the poor counties? Should we all pay 90% tax to support the billions of the third world?
- esseph 10mo ago"Fuck yous, got mine."
- henvic 10mo agoFocusing on reducing economic inequality is silly. Some people being wealth doesn't mean other people must be poor. Society has never been as rich as now, and people are getting out of misery faster and faster. Drawing attention to the fact that some outliers have an insane amount of wealth has been shadowing the real problem: politics is in getting in the way of eradicating poverty. Many people, mostly fueled by envy, misses that and instead focus on asking for taxing the wealthiest rather than noticing that poor people lives could be vastly improved by reducing taxation on them (rather than increasing the taxation of richer people, which is a silly take on the matter), removing economic barriers created by political forces, etc.
- JimmyBuckets 10mo agoThis comment is so out of touch with reality. It matters because our political systems are influenced by the wealth. More wealth equals more political power in a system where political power is supposed to be assigned via democratic vote. It also matters because wealth is not created in a vacuum. Elon Musk could not build his rockets unless his employees were educated by the public schoold system, and fuel trucks filling his rockets could use public roads, and 10,000 years of agriculture made it efficient for him to pay for his beef instead of having to go out and hunt an ox. Nobody owns anything but we all own everything. It also matters because our tax systems are set up primarily to tax labour and not capital. So working people pay for the public infrastructure that wealth then sucks up. Your privilege is showing my friend. If you were born in a favela in Brazil or on the streets in LA I guarantee you that you would not be making as much money as you are now. And when your mother dies from a preventable disease you may have a harder time dismissing wealth inequality.
- henvic 10mo agoMore wealth gives you more power in different ways, including political. That doesn't mean that society stands where it stands now because of political power. If anything, we've evolved in spite of it. And you assuming that I was born rich is hilarious. I come from the northeast from Brazil, and my parents weren't by any means rich growing up. Now, on their 70s, they're finally financially stable after a lot of hard-work, and despite the government doing their best to destroy their wealth. And to clarify: besides attending a really good private school, my childhood was quite poor (luckily, I always had a computer about 5-10 years older than the current models back then, at least; I could've newer, but your loved statism made it harder to have access to tech). You're full of prejudice. You think someone who isn't on the same page as you politically is privileged lol Wealth inequality doesn't cause people to die from preventable diseases. Your commie mindset does when they can't afford to have access to wealth, medications, leisure, access to good resources, etc.
- brap 10mo agoThe usual first-world disapproval over wealth disparity... often oblivious to the fact that you, the reader, were the global 1% all along
- JimmyBuckets 10mo agoThe minimum entry requirement for top 1% inclusion is about 1 million dollars. So your comment is just wrong.
- nh23423fefe 10mo agooh damn i guess its 2%. radically different. if its lower then skill issue
- norome 10mo agoI think it's become popular to talk about the issue of accumulation of wealth, and make this kind of dramatic wealth comparison to point out how uneven the distribution is. I wish wealth wasn't treated so abstractly as if it's some kind of universal measure of evil. I would like to learn about some specific cases of hyper wealthy people and what they are actually up to. Seems like some very rich people do really useful things with their money. Couple other thoughts that hang around my head: - Though the bottom half of humanity may be poor, on average they have a quality of life that has risen dramatically over the past century thanks in large part to the deployment of technologies and aid originating from the wealthier nations. - Historically the only time the trend of wealth accumulation reverses is during massive crises, wars, and civilizational collapse which make life worse for everyone and nobody with any sense would wish for. - It seems to me a lot of people channel their unhappiness into resentment of the wealthy, based on this same flavor of folk economics as old as time "the rich get richer". And that unhappiness is usually uncoupled from their position in the economic ladder.
- thefz 10mo ago"hey it's not so bad, the poor have showers now!" - Sent from my iPhone
- norome 10mo agoWell, the poor seem to have smartphones as well XD — Uganda for example has 54% smartphone ownership. But in terms of vaccination rates, education, access to clean water, access to electricity yes things are ever improving if we look at statistics on global wellbeing. "In 1981, 44% of the global population lived in extreme poverty. By 2019, that figure had dropped to just 9%." So inequality may be huge today, but it doesn't mean the bottom hasn't also risen dramatically.
- JimmyBuckets 10mo agoTell me you don't worry about money without telling me you don't worry about money
- 10mo ago
- rsanek 10mo agoremember, if you have at least $1 in net worth, you individually hold more wealth than the bottom 10% of the US combined! it's a meaningless statistic. https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/thirteen-million-us-households-have-negative-net-worth-will-they-ever-move-from-debt-to-wealth/ https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/thirteen-million-u...
- hollerith 10mo agoThe main asset most people have is their ability to do useful work for some employer. So for example, if a person has demonstrated a history of steady employment, some bank or finance firm would probably be willing to loan the person the money to buy a car or most of the money to buy a house. The OP completely ignores this form of wealth.
- jwarden 10mo agoAssuming a self-similar 80/20 Pareto wealth model (a fractal Lorenz curve), the headline number generalizes as: Just x% | % wealth held | × poorest half ---------+---------------+---------------- 20% | 80% | 4.00x 4.0% | 64% | 3.20x 0.80% | 51% | 2.56x 0.16% | 41% | 2.05x 0.032% | 33% | 1.64x
- keernan 10mo ago1. My first objection is the outsized ability of the wealthy to interfere with the lives of others. No known political system effectively eliminates the connection between wealth and political power/societal influence. 2. Secondly, there is a point beyond which concentrated wealth is immoral if there are large portions of humanity living without the necessities of life (as defined by society in the current era). While I struggle where the line of morality should be drawn, I say with extreme confidence the wealth of multi-billionaires is clearly far, far on the other side of that line. 3. Lastly, extreme wealth disparity is immoral in the absence of a system that ensures everyone contributes an equal personal burden (impact upon his/her life) in the cost of government/public societal benefits. That is not the case today in the United States (or anyplace else I know of).