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Annual income of richest 100 people enough to end global poverty four times over
- JackWebbHeller 14y agoWe all know it's just not that simple...
- swombat 14y agoSo, shall we just arrest the richest 100 people, confiscate their wealth, and solve all the world's problems at once?
- gamache 14y agoIn our post-moral world, we could at least pretend that's on the table.
- jswinghammer 14y agoI think he's suggesting we give it to oxfam which would at least end this guy's problems.
- calibraxis 14y agoOf course not; that is never the prescription. Because if you keep the institutions in place, gross inequality would simply reemerge. Like if you toppled the kings while keeping a feudal system, or freed all the slaves while keeping slavery intact. You have to alter the system to one which doesn't doesn't have these outcomes. Obviously, the powerful elites don't like this, as they correctly perceive this as "revolution": a fundamental change to the institutions. (An egalitarian society by definition means they won't have massively greater power than others.) So they will predictably respond with violence. (Note that the police and military effectively work for them.)
- swombat 14y agoObviously, the powerful elites don't like this I don't think so. I know a number of wealthy people, and they are very open about how to make money, how to maintain wealth, and so on. Many of them have even decided that the best way to spend their time now that they're wealthy is to teach others how to get there too. Of course, teaching 7 billion people how to behave in economically sensible ways is a pretty arduous, long-term task, so it'll take a while for the effect of this to be visible... but I don't think the "elites" are in the way of lifting everyone else up - so long as the method isn't principally to pull them down. Equalisation by bringing everyone up to the highest possible level is a worthwhile goal. Equalisation by bringing every down to the lowest possible level is not.
- danielharan 14y agoHoly straw man argument! In the linked report, Oxfam suggests even more radical things, like closing tax havens and taxing the capital gains. [sarcasm]Sadly, they do not want to arrest or kill all those rich people.[/sarcasm]
- swombat 14y agoI'm not sure which one you're calling a straw man - my jest, or the entire original article. I'm going to assume both. Only one of them is intentionally a straw man.
- ComputerGuru 14y agoOK, and the annual income of the rest of the world is enough to end it how many times over, exactly? I can guarantee you, more than four.
- sjm 14y agoBut how much of the rest of the world can afford to give up a year of income? For the richest people in the world, that's a lot easier.
- lampe 14y agoif you got 100 000 cakes that you must eat them all in 1 month and i take away from you 10 cakes or even 1000 did it really matter to you? if you got 2 cakes for a month and i take away 1 does this matter?
- shocks 14y ago>> "Does 1 cake really matter"? All of these "100 richest people" probably give away more than 100x what you earn in a year already. Are you honestly going to call them selfish? If you are, then you are saying everyone should give away as much of their "cakes" as possible. Can you afford to give away an extra "cake"? Probably. Then you are selfish too, by your own logic.
- lampe 14y agoand you know ALL the 100 people and they ALL give away so much? this is a fact for you? and you know that i don't give away my cake? this is a fact for you? what logic? you are just guessing... A quote from Charlie Chaplin:" The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate... has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed."
- jswinghammer 14y agoThe larger issue is that programs to end poverty haven't done what they have advertised to do. Poverty in Africa is getting worse in many areas as the level of aid has increased. I hesitate to start taking people's money who I don't know and just assume aren't doing anything better with it to fund programs that have poor track records. It'd be more exciting if they tried to fund these things voluntarily and then people can decide freely if they think someone can end poverty. They won't but it'd just be more interesting. The other more obvious point is that this nonprofit is claiming the world is under serious problems and that taking money from others to give to them will fix it. That is sort of a naked appeal to tax others and put it in their pockets.
- GiraffeNecktie 14y agoPeople in the first world don't appreciate what a huge diverse place is Africa. Things are getting better in some places, worse in others but there is lots of reason for optimism overall. Unfortunately, the bad news tends to get all the attention, so people here get the idea that development money doesn't do any good, period.
- shocks 14y agoYeah, and most of these rich people are also huge philanthropists that donate massive sums to charity.
- justincormack 14y agoWell, only 19 people have given more than $1bn to charity http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2011/05/19/the-worlds-biggest-givers/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2011/05/19/the-worlds... which leaves a lot of people not giving much away. The Russian oligarchs seem to like to spend money on football teams and mansions not alleviating poverty, while the Chinese rich do not seem to give much away either.
- robryan 14y agoWell, running football teams and building mansions aren't necessarily wealth destroying activities. Football teams can be relatively big employers plus distribute lare amounts to players who then also buy expensive things putting more money back into the economy. Many Chinese rich would be very large employers. Also their culture of saving allows the US to continue spending outside of their means, for now.
- adventured 14y agoThe Fed is the only thing that allows the US to continue to spend outside its means for now (including the biggest spendthrift of all, the US Government), and more specifically the dollar global reserve currency (or FRN). The Chinese aren't buying any meaningful amount of our new debt these days. Mostly they just cycle existing debt, from long to short etc as it makes sense. Ditto the Japanese, who hold almost as much junk US debt as the Chinese.
- robryan 14y agoAh, I am certainly no expert on the subject. Just trying to make the point that even these rich that generally are holding onto their wealth for themselves would be actively attempting to destroy wealth and it has to be stored somewhere doing something.
- macspoofing 14y agoWhat a ridiculous assertion. So the implicit claim is that 60 billion (per year?) is all it takes to end extreme poverty. Does anyone actually think increasing aid by that amount would actually have that effect? Is it really as simple as writing a cheque?
- __alexs 14y agoIt's something like 150x what Oxfam raise each year so I suspect it seems a lot more significant to them.
- adventured 14y agoYou could spend 50 times that and not reach the claimed outcome. Helping someone perpetually exist is not the same as teaching them how to thrive. Not to mention the biggest problem the poorest on earth have, is not a lack of money, but a lack of right to their own lives and property (via protection by a functional judicial & police system). The poorest on earth have in common a near complete lack of basic freedoms. Rivers of money won't save them from that, it's a fairy tale in the sense that the money would never reach them and or stay with them.
- danielharan 14y agoThey have a report, linked from the article, with references. Care to pick specific facts to argue about?
- jupiterjaz 14y agoPeoples definition of poverty changes over time.
- newbie12 14y agoDire poverty is self-inflicted. Corrupt, heavy-handed governments, pursuing illogical economic policies or deliberate starvation of opposition tribes. You could write that check tomorrow and the day after, Zimbabwe or North Korea or Somalia or even India would be the same. There are places in the world where the locals are killing people for offering the polio vaccine to children. Further, global poverty is actually in decline around the world. http://www.economist.com/node/21548963 http://www.economist.com/node/21548963
- rdl 14y agoI wouldn't call it "self" inflicted, but inflicted by people, yes. The poor 3 year old child who grows up in a slum isn't the one responsible.
- pretoriusB 14y ago>Dire poverty is self-inflicted. Self-inflicted? That is a bullshit western justification. Those poor peoples have been milked to extinction by colonial overlords and left do die. Not to mention that their very countries were designed and drawn on the map by colonial powers, like dividing loot, with no respect to local populations and tensions (or with full intent to exploit them, in a "divide and conquer" move). Or that even today the governments of those countries are appointed and remotely controlled by western powers, with everything from under the table deals to open military support for their cronies. Calling poverty in those places "self-inflicted" is like saying a raped woman "deserved it".
- raverbashing 14y ago"Calling poverty in those places "self-inflicted" is like saying a raped woman "deserved it"" No, absolutely not. And it is self-inflicted, "colonialist BS" aside (there are colonial issues, of course) Religion and ignorance go a long way. You can't throw money to the problem Things may seem nice and it's easy to blame 'colonial overlords' from the armchair or from the sociology departments of universities. Very Easy. Now try teaching people about safe sex and AIDS. Try teaching people about the importance of an education. There's one way to get a proper government and that's EARNING IT. Oh by the way I come from one of those "milked" countries (not to extinction and certainly not much recently) so I know what "self inflicting" means.
- rjtavares 14y agoIn this article, we learn that we can transform stock price increases into food and clothes, and that there is no corruption in undeveloped countries. Hate to be sarcastic about this topic, but that headline needs it.
- reitzensteinm 14y agoBack of the envelope calculations, grabbing some numbers off of Wikipedia: "In 2005, 43% of the world population (3.14 billion people) have an income of less than U.S. $2.5/day. 21.5% of the world population (1.4 billion people) have an income of less than US$1.25/day." So the bottom 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25/day. 1/4 of the $240 billion annual income cited is $60bn a year, spread amongst 1.4 billion people yields $0.117 a day. Assuming that the average income of that 1.4 billion is half of $1.25, that would give us an ~18% boost to income (not necessarily livelihood). Which is a surprisingly high figure. Why the hell wouldn't they lead with that? The title is clearly a fairytale to anyone with any sense.
- rwmj 14y agoPlus if you give everyone 18% more money, won't you just end up with 18% (or more) inflation as profiteering kicks in?
- danielharan 14y agoMany people would be able to afford different things, like phones, solar lights to replace kerosene, smokeless stoves, etc.
- rwmj 14y agoThe problem is that things like phones and fuel (anything that requires human effort to make or extract) will face an 18% increase in salary costs because everyone expects to take home 18% more each month. So most things will be more expensive -- whether 18% more or not, I don't know.
- gus_massa 14y agoIt's much more complex, but if everyone has 18% more money, probably the phones, lights and stoves will be 18% more expensive.
- danielharan 14y ago
- lampe 14y agothis Article is about that the richer People are getting richer and the poor people poorer... and this is a problem! I live in germany a "rich" country you may think... There is a growing part of people how have a fulltime job but they are getting not payed enough and must go employment agency to get subvention from the state...
- edent 14y agoEveryone commenting on here wants to believe that they will become one of the top 1%. No one here wants to contemplate what would happen if they fell to the bottom 1%.
- rwmj 14y agoDo you have figures to back up this broad assertion about HN readers?
- tripzilch 14y ago"The bottom 1%" is a bit of a useless demographic to contemplate, because of power-law distributions. The bottom 1% will be dead within about 1.5 years[0]. How's that for contemplation? [0] rough estimate from current world pop and global death rate, rounded up, can't be too far off
- danielharan 14y agoI think somewhere around 50k/yr puts you in the global top 1%.
- jacques_chester 14y agoIf giving people money solved poverty, there would be no poverty in wealthy countries.
- Maro 14y agoI recently spent 2 days working on a renovation project at a local slum here in Hungary. The slum is a couple hundred gipsy families, living in unfinished/abandoned houses without water, gas/heating, they steal electricity off the grid. This was during the winter, so most houses just had one heated room, using wood. The houses didn't have bathrooms, everything smelled of urine, thrash was left all over the place, inside, outside, everywhere. Since the locals steal from each other, there were very few movable/valuable objects, like tables or chairs. Interestingly though, most houses had an LCD TV, which was surreal, poeple living in quasi-homeless conditions but watching TV all day. Many families had 5-10 kids, possibly because of lack of protection and because wellfare is linear in the # of kids here. Many kids were at home all day sitting around in dirty clothes. I heard one father argue with a kid and threaten him with school as punishment. According to locals drugs are a huge problem, with most teenagers having tried out drugs or being users. Adults were also at home, obviously uneducated and unemployed, possibly without acceptable "work ethics". The experience was a bit like a post-apocalyptic movie. One of the aid people said in an interview that to "fix" this, ie. to reintegrate this group of people into society will take 2 generations in her opinion, because the social patterns in their heads have to change (don't steal, go to school, work, keep a tidy house), and that takes time. I agree. I don't think just money would help. After I came back the 2nd day, I tried to imagine what would happen if one of these families got a really nice house and a bunch of money to go along with it. But since they lack the social skills to handle property and a law-abiding, "civil life", I think many would gradually destroy the house, spend/lose the money, and then end back where they started. TLDR: Ending poverty involves changing people, which takes generations. This is the project: http://www.bagazs.org/en/ http://www.bagazs.org/en/ - An interesting (perhaps) afterthought I had after the renovation work was whether trying to change people (the gipsies in Hungary) is moral. As a group I believe gipsies have always lived a different life, navigating at the edge of society, living in their own communities. Maybe it's just us who should change and just accept that they want to live a different life? I don't know, this line of thinking reminds me of Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, where the author argues that perhaps our way of life is only special because it's aggressive, in that we annihilate or assimilate other cultures and cannot live alongside them.
- bjourne 14y ago
- Joeri 14y agoI think focusing on these 100 individuals is counterproductive, as is saying that their money can magically fix poverty. If we focus on the demonstrable, then we can say this: (1) income inequality is increasing, and (2) excessive income inequality lowers the quality of life of everyone, even the rich ( http://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Level-Equality-Societies-Stronger/dp/1608193411 http://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Level-Equality-Societies-Strong... ). So, purely out of shared self-interest we shoud all be figuring out how to reduce the inequality, by whatever mechanism. The solutions needed to structurally change inequality have to do with trade policies, laws, political coalitions, borders, cultural interaction, and many other things which have very little to do with these 100 people and how much money they have. If we could solve the underlying causes of inequality, then we wouldn't need to figure out income redistribution schemes that compensate for a broken socio-economical system.
- 3825 14y agoyes, what we forget is that poor people are just as self-centered and greedy and profit-motivated and 'evil' as every rich guy out there. What do the people in nation A need money for? I'd guess the main focus has to be in infrastructure development: 1. electricity generation and distribution 2. transportation 3. telecommunications. What can we do to make these three things as "cheap" as possible? The answer won't just help the developing countries. It will help everyone.
- bjourne 14y agoSeems most people have a trouble with the number and the report because it is from Oxfam? The UN came out with a similar number years ago (http://www.fao.org/Newsroom/en/news/2008/1000853/index.html http://www.fao.org/Newsroom/en/news/2008/1000853/index.html) $30 billion to end world hunger. Other NGO:s (which I'm to lazy to google) have come out with other figures in the same ballpark over the years. I.e if you yourself are not an expert on the global poverty problem then it takes more than "they are wrong" to refute their conclusions. The report is downloadable so just check the numbers yourself. The references makes it clear that the original figure is $175 billion spread out over two years and is produced by economist Jeff Sachs. His book "The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time" probably contains details on how it was calculated.
- iuguy 14y agoOxfam is a variable charity at best. Oxfam India, for example was found to spend 70% of what it received in donations on fundraising[1]. In the UK it spends a significant volume of money on fundraising, paying a company called Tag Campaigns to raise money in the streets, not without controversy[2][3]. Oxfam GB also acts as a lobbyist in the UK, receives large amounts of funding from the government and has particularly close ties to the Labour party[4]. I realise that this is easy to construe an attack on Oxfam rather than the crux of the post, but my point here is that Oxfam have a vested interest in highlighting such things, regardless of whether or not there's anything tangible that can be done in order to raise funds. I would encourage anyone looking to donate to charity to do some basic due diligence on their charity of choice, and to preferably donate to a smaller local charity first. [1] - http://capitalmind.in/2011/06/oxfam-india-spends-70-of-donations-as-fund-raising-cost/ http://capitalmind.in/2011/06/oxfam-india-spends-70-of-donat... [2] - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/9367193/Charities-ditch-street-chuggers-after-Sunday-Telegraph-investigation.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandcon... [3] - http://www.charitywatch.org/articles/street_solicitations.html http://www.charitywatch.org/articles/street_solicitations.ht... [4] - http://fakecharities.org/2011/02/charity-202918/ http://fakecharities.org/2011/02/charity-202918/
- jake_D 14y agoThe underlying assumption of the above headline is that the same amount of goods will be produced, even if you take the rich'es revenues away from them. Well, false. Without proper incentives innovation will decline, and the average purchase power will decrease. Marxism has been tried and failed. Perhaps the rich should be taxed differently, but the simplistic assertion (ending poverty four times over) is obviously false.
- antihero 14y agoIn control systems we learned about positive and negative feedback systems. Capitalism is an example of "positive feedback" and without correct governance (or destruction) is effectively an unstable system, which just leads to a massive divide between people who got rich and those who are stuck being poor.
- rxever 14y agoWhy is this not on the front page of HN anymore? Currently has 35 points and is 3 hours old. Vs an article "Math in Fiction - over 1000 short ..." that has 22 points and is 5 hours old?
- codex 14y agoThis strongly depends on the definition of poverty. If poverty is: a) Objectively defined, such as "no person goes hungry" ... then I think this statement may be true. However, if poverty is defined as: b) Look at all these poor people! They can barely afford their cell phones! ... then it will never be eliminated, because there will always be a bottom 5%, even as the wealth of that bottom 5% continuously increases. The poor in the U.S., for example, have never been better off then they are today. And it may well turn out that living in an unequal society (U.S.) results in more wealth for the poorest even over living in a society where everyone is equal (Soviet Union)--but is equally poor.
- abrown28 14y agoGive a man a fish...