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.
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.
Your headline could be rephrased as "Someone who has a balance of 0 is wealthier than someone $100 overdraft" and you wouldn't blink.
What are you even questioning here??
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/13-million-american-household...
There’s nothing misleading about the fact that negative net worth is worse than zero. And a person without debt factually does have far more wealth than 10 million people in debt.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
What if instead of comparing people in, say America to people in South Sudan, you compare people in America to people in America.
Most of their wealth is probably in companies operating globally. It seems more easy to tax profits in local markets. And increase competition…
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.
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.
I mean that's definition of top 10% that top 10% is better than other 90%. Journalists should prove read titles before submitting
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%?
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?
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)
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.
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.
Eventually everything from vehicles to housing will be rented to us as a way to extract the little wealth that’s left. Or layered subscription services. These aren’t great corporate ideas they are extractions of wealth.
The difference is about power. The wealth being this concentrated means the power is concentrated.
If people are okay with the idea of an ETF, or a wealth manager (or any type do fund manager/investment bank) then they should be okay with sovereign wealth funds/national ETFs that provide dividends with a guaranteed single share single vote setup.
If you want competition, then the US government used to be good at creating and sustaining artificial compétition in military procurement - similar to how Amazon let's teams compete on the same projects internally.
Because the competition would be artificially and enforced by laws, there's just as much as potential for massive efficiency gains as there is potential for corruption (the Norwegian national wealth fund has gone swimmingly for them)
I also think there are problems with having poor people have a say in how money should be invested. I think Bezos has a better say in how Amazon should run rather than random people.
These sentiments are popular on Hacker News. For the readers: Consider that a few out-of-touch tech people who believe that rich people are some kind of genius, and that that is why they manage money is a circular argument.
Disclaimer: I'm a successful software engineer that wouldn't mind paying more taxes, if the rich paid their honest part.
The wealth is zero sum - you have to take away investments from Amazon etc and drive it into other places. That means Amazon will be smaller, employ fewer people and produce lesser. Why do you think that is necessarily a good thing? If you think that it is, then you can also stop the NASA program and drive all funds to poverty.
A bigger problem as that fewer and fewer have any say in the direction of society now. That concentrated investment means they get to shape the world we live in. Years ago I had a more libertarian mindset about that as well. “They’re more likely to make better decisions with it because they made the money to begin with.” I no longer feel that way. It increasingly looks like the most wealthy are happy to destroy the world for everyone in their quest to become ever more elite.
1) Wealthy people account for more and more % of consumption (now about 50% in the US). Source by Federal Reserve via Bloomberg: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/capital-markets/top-10-of-earn....
2) "Investment in productive companies" now either goes to:
a) financial instruments that exist for pure wealth extraction/multiplication in form of being a landlord, private equity, REITS, etc.
c) stock market which is eaten by AI-adjacent companies which primary incentive is job displacement.
The idea that wealthy make decision beneficial to wider audience is as outdated as trickle-down economics. Both are false.
2)
a) PE is owned mostly by pension firms that the public has a huge stake in. Billionaires have stake mostly in their own companies rather than in PE firms.
b) AI investment for job displacement is necessary for overall prosperity and efficiency.
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.
The majority of human civilisation has been feudal. We recently got democracy for everyone. We are not yet out of reach of our local civilisational attractor.
not good.
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.
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?
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.
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.
- 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.
- Sent from my iPhone
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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.