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Top 1% Control 39% of World's Wealth

15 points by codegeek 13y ago

dtrizzle 13y ago
I hate headlines like this. Wealth is not finite.
- sophacles 13y ago
  No, but it is bounded by how much exists at given time. Further, had you bothered to read the article, they explicitly talk about the growth of wealth in the word. I hate commenters like this - don't read the article, think they know something about what it says.
  - hacker789 13y ago
    He commented specifically on the headline, not on the article itself.
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    It's true that the tone of the article wasn't stabbing at the rich and wealthy, but I think the commenter's point is still valid. The headline utilizes a highly politically charged statement model - "The top 1% control $LIMITED_COMMODITY"
    - sophacles 13y ago
      I didn't get that. Besides, the thing you are disingenuously failing to understand is that while wealth grows and is not a finite thing on long time scales, the growth is slow enough that controlling 40% of the currently existing wealth, and a sudden surge to say 10% total wealth increase in the next year (a big jump) going only to people not in the top 1%, would still leave those people with a huge disproportion of wealth ownership. It takes a huge amount of mental gymnastics to pretend this is is something that could change any moment because wealth is not fixed amount resource.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  The sensationalism surrounding this is really kind of sad. It also drives a knife through the intellectual aptitudes of my circle of friends. People don't really understand game theory or sociological models well enough to understand that this sort of wealth distribution makes sense, when you look at data. The biggest impediment to this, in my experience, is that people expect reality to intuitively make sense, and operate according to their intuitive ideals of what's correct. Nature has no reason to do this, and is often...very unintuitive.
  - czr80 13y ago
    Ok. I understand game theory. What do you mean that this "makes sense"?
    - dylangs1030 13y ago
      It makes sense as in it's expected. Economists come to expect this as a "rising tide" - it eventually happens. It waxes and wanes, but it does happen and it's not a grand conspiracy. It's the market fluctuating.
  - jbooth 13y ago
    This sort of wealth distribution is almost without precedent in the modern economy. It happened before in the 1920s and didn't end well. If you understand "game theory or sociological models well enough to understand that this sort of wealth distribution makes sense, when you look at data", can you explain it to me? I was under the impression that it's a disturbing trend and would love to be comforted.
    - dylangs1030 13y ago
      A good jumping point would be the "Matthew Effect" - the sociological theory of accumulated advantage. This is usually paraphrased as "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" in lay parlance but it is a legitimate academic theory in sociology. It illustrates a model of wealth distribution - particularly wealth disparity, and how it's somewhat inevitable despite repeated system "tweaks".
dylangs1030 13y ago
Excellent motivation to become wealthy, but not necessarily new information.
- rooshdi 13y ago
  How is it motivating? If anything, it highlights the growing disparity of wealth in the world. Seems like humanity is going backwards.
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    Which side do you want to be on? The side that controls the greatest piece of the pie or the side that is the pie? Does that sound too cynical to you? It's just my opinion, but I'm not going to hold it against mankind that some people have A Lot More Stuff. Wealth is not a finite resource, it can be had in a variety of different ways for the creative. Inheritances aside, if getting rich is the side effect to booming innovation, I'm not too bummed about it. It's business, and the rich have no compuctions about selling you something to feel better about mankind's slow devolution into hedonism, so why not get on board with them? When you become rich, you will have more power, influence and resources to Save The World. Start there?
lifeguard 13y ago
If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree. source of quotes: http://occupywriters.com/works/by-lemony-snicket http://occupywriters.com/works/by-lemony-snicket
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  Did you read the article? This isn't about Occupy Wall Street at all. It's not criticizing the 1% and doesn't seem in line with your comment here.
  - lifeguard 13y ago
    Do you know what the occupy movement is about at all? I don't think so. It is not about Wall Street.
    - dylangs1030 13y ago
      No, but Wall Street is the biggest success (that I know of) of that movement. I'm not saying your ideological stance is wrong, I'm saying it doesn't seem relevant to this article.
      - lifeguard 13y ago
        I up voted this reply. Good point.
- mseebach 13y ago
  That article is well written but that's concealing a lot of logical fallacies. Hard work might not be a perfect predictor of success, but it's a lot stronger than the relationship between baldness and height. I also enjoyed the vague, there but not quite, threat of violence that you quoted the beginning of. Also, the fallacious audacity of claiming to speak for the 99%. If the 99% had any kind of common ground to their concerns, they could elect a vast majority in every single elected body in the US and get their way, almost overnight (in practice, it'll take four years).
marknutter 13y ago
And yet they only have 24 hours in the day to live their life like everybody else. I only envy people's wealth up to a point, after which having more money doesn't really do a whole lot for you because enjoyment of that wealth just doesn't scale. And if everybody's wealth is increasing worldwide, what good does it do us to point out that it's increasing faster for some than others? After all, their wealth is increasing faster because their risking it in the stock market, which drives the growth of the economy. Doesn't bother me in the least.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  The article wasn't deriding wealth in tune with the usual tone of that headline. But you're right, it shouldn't bother you. Friends of mine react with disgust that someone can make $200k or much, much more as a programmer, consultant, startup entrepreneur (particularly in the last case). "Who needs all that money? What are you going to do with it all?" These are typically people who wouldn't mind having that much money either. It doesn't matter what's done with it all. Successful people drive the economy. It's the opposite, being miserly with money, that's bad for the economy.
  - marknutter 13y ago
    It's hard to see headlines like this and not think it's deriding the wealthy. It could have been put in a much more innocuous way, like "99% of the world's population controls 61% of the world's wealth". That just doesn't seem to have the same punch, though.
    - dylangs1030 13y ago
      No, it doesn't, because 99 people in a room controlling 61 pieces of a pie aren't as influential as 1 man controlling 39 pieces of pie. He has very real, formidable power. The least influential of the 99 will dislike that. They all have to share their 61 pieces - in practice, a significant fraction have no pieces of pie. Analogy aside, the way this model of wealth plays out is that the 1% are typically the only outlier, and the other 99% don't all control the remaining wealth in the same way - they don't have a disproportionate amount to their own percentile, or a number larger than themselves. But disproportionate amounts of money is potentially good - think of what billionaires can do if they are so inclined.
skylan_q 13y ago
So 99% control 61% of the wealth.
blazespin 13y ago
This is a red herring. Rather than control of wealth, we should be concerned with control of consumption. Poor people make lousy capital allocators (they don't have the right education, they don't have access to industry contacts, and they don't have a history of successful investing). We constantly talk about redistributing income, taxing the high income earners. We have to stop this. We have to start taxing the high consumers, we need a progressive consumption tax. If someone makes a very high income, but saves it all rather than buys that flashy (frankly, worthless) car - then they should be allowed to keep all of that.
- Joeboy 13y ago
  > Poor people make lousy capital allocators Do they? My intuition would be that giving a thousand people a thousand bucks each would mostly have better results than giving one person a million bucks. Occasionally the rich come up with a Gates Foundation or whatever, but there's an opportunity cost to handing billions of dollars to billg too.
- gte910h 13y ago
  What? Are you insane. Consumption drives the economy. Hoarding slows it down. Why as a society would we want to punish consumption!
holograham 13y ago
you can create wealth
mzeshle 13y ago
I think every one should read: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html to understand the difference between wealth and money.
michalu 13y ago
Oh so it's not World's wealth but worlds private wealth. Why not to misrepresent it - remaining 99% is a good target market to get some readership for this trash. The face value of financial derivatives market if 6 times higher ($791 trillion) than the world's private wealth. Bond market and stockmarket are of a similar value to private wealth. Who owns majority of those? Governments, pension funds, insurance firms...

15 points by codegeek 13y ago

dtrizzle 13y ago

I hate headlines like this. Wealth is not finite.

sophacles 13y ago
No, but it is bounded by how much exists at given time. Further, had you bothered to read the article, they explicitly talk about the growth of wealth in the word. I hate commenters like this - don't read the article, think they know something about what it says.
- hacker789 13y ago
  He commented specifically on the headline, not on the article itself.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  It's true that the tone of the article wasn't stabbing at the rich and wealthy, but I think the commenter's point is still valid. The headline utilizes a highly politically charged statement model - "The top 1% control $LIMITED_COMMODITY"
  - sophacles 13y ago
    I didn't get that. Besides, the thing you are disingenuously failing to understand is that while wealth grows and is not a finite thing on long time scales, the growth is slow enough that controlling 40% of the currently existing wealth, and a sudden surge to say 10% total wealth increase in the next year (a big jump) going only to people not in the top 1%, would still leave those people with a huge disproportion of wealth ownership. It takes a huge amount of mental gymnastics to pretend this is is something that could change any moment because wealth is not fixed amount resource.
dylangs1030 13y ago
The sensationalism surrounding this is really kind of sad. It also drives a knife through the intellectual aptitudes of my circle of friends. People don't really understand game theory or sociological models well enough to understand that this sort of wealth distribution makes sense, when you look at data. The biggest impediment to this, in my experience, is that people expect reality to intuitively make sense, and operate according to their intuitive ideals of what's correct. Nature has no reason to do this, and is often...very unintuitive.
- czr80 13y ago
  Ok. I understand game theory. What do you mean that this "makes sense"?
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    It makes sense as in it's expected. Economists come to expect this as a "rising tide" - it eventually happens. It waxes and wanes, but it does happen and it's not a grand conspiracy. It's the market fluctuating.
- jbooth 13y ago
  This sort of wealth distribution is almost without precedent in the modern economy. It happened before in the 1920s and didn't end well. If you understand "game theory or sociological models well enough to understand that this sort of wealth distribution makes sense, when you look at data", can you explain it to me? I was under the impression that it's a disturbing trend and would love to be comforted.
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    A good jumping point would be the "Matthew Effect" - the sociological theory of accumulated advantage. This is usually paraphrased as "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" in lay parlance but it is a legitimate academic theory in sociology. It illustrates a model of wealth distribution - particularly wealth disparity, and how it's somewhat inevitable despite repeated system "tweaks".

dylangs1030 13y ago

Excellent motivation to become wealthy, but not necessarily new information.

rooshdi 13y ago
How is it motivating? If anything, it highlights the growing disparity of wealth in the world. Seems like humanity is going backwards.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  Which side do you want to be on? The side that controls the greatest piece of the pie or the side that is the pie? Does that sound too cynical to you? It's just my opinion, but I'm not going to hold it against mankind that some people have A Lot More Stuff. Wealth is not a finite resource, it can be had in a variety of different ways for the creative. Inheritances aside, if getting rich is the side effect to booming innovation, I'm not too bummed about it. It's business, and the rich have no compuctions about selling you something to feel better about mankind's slow devolution into hedonism, so why not get on board with them? When you become rich, you will have more power, influence and resources to Save The World. Start there?

lifeguard 13y ago

If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree. source of quotes: http://occupywriters.com/works/by-lemony-snicket http://occupywriters.com/works/by-lemony-snicket

dylangs1030 13y ago
Did you read the article? This isn't about Occupy Wall Street at all. It's not criticizing the 1% and doesn't seem in line with your comment here.
- lifeguard 13y ago
  Do you know what the occupy movement is about at all? I don't think so. It is not about Wall Street.
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    No, but Wall Street is the biggest success (that I know of) of that movement. I'm not saying your ideological stance is wrong, I'm saying it doesn't seem relevant to this article.
    - lifeguard 13y ago
      I up voted this reply. Good point.
mseebach 13y ago
That article is well written but that's concealing a lot of logical fallacies. Hard work might not be a perfect predictor of success, but it's a lot stronger than the relationship between baldness and height. I also enjoyed the vague, there but not quite, threat of violence that you quoted the beginning of. Also, the fallacious audacity of claiming to speak for the 99%. If the 99% had any kind of common ground to their concerns, they could elect a vast majority in every single elected body in the US and get their way, almost overnight (in practice, it'll take four years).

marknutter 13y ago

And yet they only have 24 hours in the day to live their life like everybody else. I only envy people's wealth up to a point, after which having more money doesn't really do a whole lot for you because enjoyment of that wealth just doesn't scale. And if everybody's wealth is increasing worldwide, what good does it do us to point out that it's increasing faster for some than others? After all, their wealth is increasing faster because their risking it in the stock market, which drives the growth of the economy. Doesn't bother me in the least.

dylangs1030 13y ago
The article wasn't deriding wealth in tune with the usual tone of that headline. But you're right, it shouldn't bother you. Friends of mine react with disgust that someone can make $200k or much, much more as a programmer, consultant, startup entrepreneur (particularly in the last case). "Who needs all that money? What are you going to do with it all?" These are typically people who wouldn't mind having that much money either. It doesn't matter what's done with it all. Successful people drive the economy. It's the opposite, being miserly with money, that's bad for the economy.
- marknutter 13y ago
  It's hard to see headlines like this and not think it's deriding the wealthy. It could have been put in a much more innocuous way, like "99% of the world's population controls 61% of the world's wealth". That just doesn't seem to have the same punch, though.
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    No, it doesn't, because 99 people in a room controlling 61 pieces of a pie aren't as influential as 1 man controlling 39 pieces of pie. He has very real, formidable power. The least influential of the 99 will dislike that. They all have to share their 61 pieces - in practice, a significant fraction have no pieces of pie. Analogy aside, the way this model of wealth plays out is that the 1% are typically the only outlier, and the other 99% don't all control the remaining wealth in the same way - they don't have a disproportionate amount to their own percentile, or a number larger than themselves. But disproportionate amounts of money is potentially good - think of what billionaires can do if they are so inclined.

skylan_q 13y ago

So 99% control 61% of the wealth.

blazespin 13y ago

This is a red herring. Rather than control of wealth, we should be concerned with control of consumption. Poor people make lousy capital allocators (they don't have the right education, they don't have access to industry contacts, and they don't have a history of successful investing). We constantly talk about redistributing income, taxing the high income earners. We have to stop this. We have to start taxing the high consumers, we need a progressive consumption tax. If someone makes a very high income, but saves it all rather than buys that flashy (frankly, worthless) car - then they should be allowed to keep all of that.

Joeboy 13y ago
> Poor people make lousy capital allocators Do they? My intuition would be that giving a thousand people a thousand bucks each would mostly have better results than giving one person a million bucks. Occasionally the rich come up with a Gates Foundation or whatever, but there's an opportunity cost to handing billions of dollars to billg too.
gte910h 13y ago
What? Are you insane. Consumption drives the economy. Hoarding slows it down. Why as a society would we want to punish consumption!

holograham 13y ago

you can create wealth

mzeshle 13y ago

I think every one should read: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html to understand the difference between wealth and money.

michalu 13y ago

Oh so it's not World's wealth but worlds private wealth. Why not to misrepresent it - remaining 99% is a good target market to get some readership for this trash. The face value of financial derivatives market if 6 times higher ($791 trillion) than the world's private wealth. Bond market and stockmarket are of a similar value to private wealth. Who owns majority of those? Governments, pension funds, insurance firms...