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Report: 110 people own 35% of Russia's wealth
- tipiirai 13y agoDisgusting tendency allover the world.
- WhaleBiologist 13y agoSchools need to empower and educate young people as to how to create wealth, and not just how to fit into a predesigned hole the labor market has ready for you. Until that happens the relatively few people that 'get' wealth creation will always have the biggest slice of the pie.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoMost of those people did not create any wealth, they just got chunks of Soviet wealth in early 90-s.
- camus 13y agoIrrelevant! these wealthy russians stole anything they could,they did not create any wealth.
- Mikeb85 13y agoThis is what happens when you privatize massive industries without proper processes in place... Most of these people inherited billion dollar businesses when the Soviet Union crumbled.
- kutakbash 13y agoThe irony of this is that lack of 'proper processes' occurred because the new government had to do this ASAP, before the 'red managers' (actual management of properties in question), backed by labour collectives, assume control over the means of production in the country and reverse the 'democratization', privatization and whatever new shiny things reformists intended to do.
- PeterisP 13y agoNow that is "1% of 1% of 1%", literally.
- taybin 13y agoWe are the 99.99%.
- hedgew 13y agoThe six Walmart heirs have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined.
- softbuilder 13y agoHow much of America's wealth is that?
- eck 13y agoNot much. A fraction of Americans have negative net worths. If you have no debts and a nickel in your pocket, you're worth more than all of them put together. It's an oft-used misleading statistic.
- KnightHawk3 13y agoFrom a quick google, then reading some wikipedia then linking the source, it seems its about 5~% of households http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/oss/oss2/papers/concentration.2001.10.pdf http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/oss/oss2/papers/concentra...
- dwiel 13y agoAlso, if your net worth is -$0.05, you're worth more than all of those with less than you combined! Not only that but as someone with a net worth of -$10k, you too are worth more than the bottom 5% [1] of Americans combined as well. I guess a more interesting metric would be to count people with debt in these combined statistics as having nothing rather than having negative net worth, even if they do. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6527192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6527192
- tobr 13y agoSo you could craft a headline targeting the individual with the highest debt and still say "this greedy scumbag has more money than n% of the population combined", where n is the percent of people who have negative wealth.
- omonra 13y agoI would urge readers to refrain from the kneejerk reaction 'it's happening all over now'. What is happening in the Western world (rise of inequality due to skills being prized higher owing to technological change) is very different to what happened in Russia. There a band of people connected to the government (first it was party apparatchiks, then friends of Putin) plundered resources owned by the state. And almost all of them have to do with stuff being pulled out of the ground.
- gaius 13y agoIt's fascinating that so many of them are ex-KGB. These guys would have been painstakingly vetted for their impeccable ideological purity before being recruited in the first place, let alone promoted. These were the ultimate guardians of the Communist system, and they turned hyper-capitalist overnight. I guess it's like we see in the West when holier-than-thou politicians are enmeshed in a corruption scandal but like everything Russian, executed on a grand scale. Have you seen the size of their novels?!
- delinka 13y ago"... vetted for their impeccable ideological purity ..." Rather, vetted for their impeccable ability to wax lyrical about "ideological purity." I'd suggest that these guys are personalities that learn how to survive in the current climate regardless what that climate happens to be.
- auctiontheory 13y agoI'd suggest that these guys are personalities that learn how to survive in the current climate regardless what that climate happens to be. Well said. And that's a great skill to have. (I often wish I had more of it.)
- znowi 13y ago> survive in the current climate It helps when the president is your fellow KGB pal :) Proper affiliation and loyalty is all you need. It's common folk that really have to survive.
- return0 13y agoSo it's a lot like the west.
- masklinn 13y agoBy comparison, the top 400 people in the US have 2.5% of the US's wealth (using Forbes's 2010 numbers of $1.37 trillion for the top 400 households, and the Federal Reserve Board's $54.9 trillion US net worth)
- jschulenklopper 13y agoThis is an interesting presentation (and told in a powerful way) on the wealth distribution in USA: http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-10-americans-are-completely-wrong-about-this-mind-blowing-fact-2 http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-10-americans-are-completely...
- simias 13y agoThis is a terrible website tricking me into liking it on facebook. Here's the video on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
- jschulenklopper 13y agoSorry. I guess my social media button filter is tighter than yours, as I didn't see Like-buttons at all. On top, the introduction on UpWorthy, mentioning the authors reaction when watching the story unfold, added anticipation for watching it.
- grannyg00se 13y ago"All we need to do is wake up and realize that the reality is not what we think it is" Somehow I don't think a sudden realization is going to make a whole lot of difference. To make any difference we're going to need a complete upheaval of the mechanism and culture of the country. And not just any one country. The entire global financial system is geared to support and further this kind of imbalance.
- tedunangst 13y agoHere's a fun experiment: Graph what you think wealth distribution should be. Take the derivative to see what you think income should be. Take the derivative again to see what you think your raise should be.
- tokenadult 13y agoChina has a similar problem. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/01/20/the-china-miracle-a-rising-wealth-gap/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/01/20/the-china-m... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-05/china-approves-income-plan-as-wealth-divide-poses-risks.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-05/china-approves-inco... This is frightening to social scientists in China who analyze society from a Marxist framework, especially those who have noticed that regional wealth gaps in China are greater than those in Yugoslavia before Yugoslavia disintegrated.
- selmnoo 13y agoAmerica has a somewhat similar problem. One family right now has more wealth than the bottom 40% of the American population combined. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/18/business/la-fi-mo-walmart-heirs-20120718 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/18/business/la-fi-mo-wa...
- Shivetya 13y agoit was a stupid study done to score points with specific groups, basically another bash Wal-Mart to appeal to those bobble heads who rally around that sort of stuff. It takes a lot to ignore all the other wealthy individuals and groups to zero in on that family. Throw out the negative equity people and the numbers were not as bad, use median income and the numbers are better. I doubt the comparisons made in China and Russia are the same as this study you cite was. Besides, most importantly, the Waltons earned it, most of the wealth locked in China and Russia are either ex political power players or their friends. Still, when it comes to China and even Russia, what has really changed? The same people ruling and having control of the wealth when they were not "open" markets are basically the same now.
- yodsanklai 13y ago"Besides, most importantly, the Waltons earned it, most of the wealth locked in China and Russia are either ex political power players or their friends." The distinction here is arbitrary. When we talk about such amount of wealth, I think the verb "to earn" lose some his significance. As a society, I don't believe we should accept that a few persons own such a huge proportion of the wealth (regardless whether they "earned" it, stole it, found it...).
- cold_reset 13y agoThose rich are personal friends of Putin or are connected to him. They don't produce any goods, they just exploit Russia's natural wealth. Russian economy survives just because of its oil and gas. It will completely lose its weight when it ran out of its black gold.
- rjzzleep 13y agoisn't that what happened when the IMF tried to transition the former sovjet union to a free market in record time? also, isn't that why putin is so liked among a large portion of the people, because he brutally stripped away some of these guys wealths?(probably adding some to his own in the process)
- VladRussian2 13y agoTzar transferring wealth from (and publicly humiliating and stripping them of all the privileges, etc...) non-110%-loyal to him rich people (who built their wealth by "stealing from people" - in Russian mentality there is no other way to build a wealth) to the loyal ones is the national reality show in Russia. People there just love a "strict, yet just tzar".
- marknutter 13y agoSo when people say that our growing wealth inequality in the US will lead to economic ruin, does Russia and China not refute that premise?
- antonioevans 13y ago20 years of Capitalism is a small amount of time to refute a premise. They need decades more of booms, busts and bubbles till you can see the financial and political results of such socioeconomical imbalances.
- camus 13y agoWould you want to live in Russia or China?
- tiatia 13y agoWell, I have a US passport (naturalized). Yes, I want to live in China and I am actually going to.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gesman 13y agoLenin tried to push his "fair wealth distribution" ideas. We are all aware of results.
- dkuntz2 13y agoNot really. Leninist ideals went out the window when Stalin took over. The results you're citing aren't due to Leninism, but Stalinism.
- lutusp 13y agoMuch like here. Different country, similar distribution of wealth. This supports an old adage about the difference between Russia and the U.S. -- in Russia, it's dog eat dog. Here, it's the other way around.
- whiddershins 13y agoTo my mind,this highlights a flaw in free market theory. Obviously this scenario was not created by market forces. But now that the inequality exists, does anyone seriously believe a perfect free market economy, if implemented in Russia tomorrow, would act to substantially undo the resource distribution issue?
- hartator 13y agoIt proves the opposite at contrary. Corruption is the enemy of free market. The article explains that this situation is due to Vladimir Poutine giving away taxpayer money in huge amount for control and loyalty. Doesn't sound like free market.
- kenster07 13y agoThere are lots of "flaws" in free markets, if you're using econ101 bullet points as a blueprint.
- patmcguire 13y agoIn Ukraine, the richest 50 people own 85%. Which is way more eye-popping. http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=33765#.UlbL3mTXiGo http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_n...
- valtron 13y agoWell, because of the population difference, it's not "way" more eye-popping, though still more uneven than Russia. Ukraine: 45.6M; 50 people = 0.0000012% own 85% Russia: 143.5M; 110 people = 0.0000007% own 35%
- pavanky 13y agoIt doesn't matter what the percentage of population is at those numbers.
- AJ007 13y agoBloomberg has a good rebuttal about the measurements used in this "study": http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-10/just-how-rich-are-russia-s-billionaires-.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-10/just-how-rich-are-r... Additionally Russia's gini coefficient (income rather than wealth) puts the US as more unequal than Russia.
- adventured 13y agoPerfect income equality is not an ideal, it's a marxist fraud used as ideological cover while the elites keep the "proletariat" held in intense but semi-equal poverty. You should not get paid the same thing for different work. If I work twice as hard as you at the same task, you should not make as much as I do.
- rplacd 13y agoComplete income inequality isn't even orthodox Marx - "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" goes the standard quote by Marx; but that was his study of a specific utopia. (The rest of the cited work in fact goes on to rip its jaws into a transitional programme wrought out of "effective politicking" - pointed stuff.) The official CPSU line was then "To each according to his contribution" in the "transitional" period - through Trotsky and Lenin; so goes the degeneration. I wonder how long it then took to get to imposed equality.
- james1071 13y agoYou could move some of the words around and it would make just as much sense.
- e12e 13y ago> If I work twice as hard as you at the same task, you should not make as much as I do. If you're struggling to program something and I do it easily, you should be compensated for your incompetence? Work shouldn't be defined by effort but by results -- and that isn't always reasonable to quantify (which would be needed if it was to be the basis of a (fair) reward system). I agree that "perfect equality" isn't an ideal (in pretty much anything). I do thing equal opportunity is a worthy goal, though.
- znowi 13y agoMost, if not all, of these people are criminals in the past, who'd been given decades in prison if properly investigated, but are now respectable gentlemen.
- ansgri 13y agoThat's more than logical, considering that thousands of respectable gentlemen were serving decades in GULAG.
- bostonpete 13y ago> The 35 percent of wealth that Russian billionaires > own is equivalent to $420 billion. According to Wikipedia, the wealth of Russia is $5.61T. What am I missing...? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_wealth#Statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_wealth#Statistics
- Gormo 13y agoThose 110 people would seem to own 100% of their own wealth; what makes any of it "Russia's wealth"?
- wavefunction 13y agoWhat a ridiculous thing to post. Most of these billionaires have epic mining or extraction concessions from the government of Russia, concessions that are the result of political favoritism and crony and nepotism. Many are former KGB who leveraged their political positions to profit off the chaos and rise of the greatest KGB opportunist of all-time: Putin. These are the exact sort of people you should be attacking if you at all believe in a free-market and capitalist meritocracy.
- Gormo 13y ago> Most of these billionaires have epic mining or extraction concessions from the government of Russia, concessions that are the result of political favoritism and crony and nepotism. The article is pretty terse, and doesn't go into detail on how anyone in particular acquired their wealth. It doesn't enumerate the particular 110 people and attempt to sort the ones who acquired their wealth via illegitimate methods from those who didn't. It simply implies that there was some unified pool of wealth owned by an abstract aggregation called "Russia", and these 110 people have claimed tremendously disproportionate shares of this wealth, without any substantive evidence being offered that this is what actually happened. Sure, perhaps the Soviet state controlled most of the wealth within its territory while it existed, but the Soviet state acquired control of that wealth by simply seizing it from its previous owners; can we be absolutely sure that none of those 110 were simply using the corrupt institutions of the subsequent Russian state to reclaim wealth that was properly theirs in the first place? I'm not making any apologies for the Russian government here; it's entirely possible and quite probable that many people in Russia do indeed manipulate a corrupt political system in order to capture other people's wealth for themselves. What I'm criticizing here is the article, which presumes, without arguing the case, that people owning large amounts of wealth is somehow itself evidence that abuse has occurred, and which implies through its wording that wealth originates, initially unowned, in some kind of aggregation.
- JackFr 13y agoIn Soviet Union 35 people own 110% of the wealth.