Just 0.001% Hold 3 Times the Wealth of Poorest Half of Humanity, Report Finds

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.

Another example of your logic, any MD with a huge student debt is worse off than pretty much everyone in undeveloped world?

Or a person with a business loan but a successful business.

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.

So invididual transport alone (not even counting indirect emissions from vehicle construction, road infrastructure etc.) is already significant.

What fraction of emissions would you blame on corporations alone (which corporations)?

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.

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.

I agree with your problem assessment, but it’s been known since the Greeks that democracy inevitably ends in oligarchy. It’s why the US did not start out as a democracy as the founders knew this as well.

And if you think about it from first principles, of course it’ll end like that. Mass groups of people are easily manipulated by a smaller group. Cambridge analytica is the modern form of this but it’s happened for centuries. You say regulation, but who writes and enforces that regulation? The oligarchs.

This gets uncomfortable when you look inward and start to question “why do I have this idea in my head that democracy is an objective good thing for society”. The same oligarchs benefiting from democracy write the history books, own the media, etc. Elon musk knows exactly what he is doing and is laughing with the other billionaires at us.

That isn't even wrong.

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.

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.

Wealth is ownership, ownership is control of value. Allocating more (not all) value away from SaaS companies and into food security or education is a good thing and would make things better for everyone.

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.

Many grandparents are too frail to dig enough spuds or work the garden - anecdotally 70s is when limitations often start to really kick in. Grandparents are now trending older?

To make matters worse, this year's Nobel prize in Economics went to research showing that the problem is governments, and specifically that a lot of populous countries don't create institutions to improve the welfare of people at all, but rather focused on stealing from the population. This makes it an unfixable problem in those countries. More than that, a lot of these countries' populations don't want to fix it, or even make it far worse (like Egypt) for a whole host of reasons.

Oh and most of those governments are "captured by wealth" only in the sense that the current rulers exploit the population for their personal wealth. This is what you see from Afghanistan to Venezuela, but those governments didn't come to power with wealth. Various ideologies brought these governments to power, and the governments steal the wealth of the people, often to an extent that people start dieing in pretty large numbers like in Afghanistan. I also find it strange that when discussing capture by wealth no-one ever takes Venezuela as an example, despite how obvious it is that that's the problem there. Nobody discusses how Chavez came to power as a communist and died a billionaire.

So if you want to fix poverty, one of the things it looks like you'll have to do is to overthrow the governments ruling, actually more than half of humanity, and convince their populations to stop caring more about religion and other ideologies, like pride, or a mostly imagined enemy (like Pakistan), than about prosperity.

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, access to good resources, etc.

I'm more saying there's a sort of historical inevitability in the whole situation and we might benefit by taking that into consideration. And that some degree of nuance and tolerance of unfairness might play into a realistic solution.

Regarding landlordism, it's another tricky issue where yes there are bad big landlords, but the policies I've seen that put in place to tackle them tend disincentivize renting altogether and the first ones out of the market are the little guys, exasterbating the housing crisis in most cities. It seems to me an area where tolerating the bad actors is necessary to avoid crashing the whole system, to my point.

This is mostly because we’re ruled by elites that hate us. Noblesse oblige is a thing and wealth disparity is not necessarily a bad thing. What’s bad is our current elites using wealth to enrich themselves instead of planting trees (so to speak) for America.

There are humans out there who are much better than the rest of us at doing things. I’d like the subset of those that care for their people to have money and power.

The missing piece from this conversation is our current elites have made all the elements that produce good rulers taboo. The term “blood and soil” is a big no no, but it’s also the kind of cultural bond that’s needed to produce good rulers. What more noble cause is there than sacrificing for your land and people? Its been a rallying cry for all of human history.

The oligarchs that run society know exactly what kind of ideas will remove them from power and make sure these ideas are effectively banned.

If it's true that all these .001 percent of the population are indeed self-serving sociopaths, I'll eat my hat. But I just assume things are more complex than wealth = evil.

I could say with certainty that wealth magnifies the qualities and intention of whoever controls it. And we might argue nobody should have so much power. But I don't see why tremendous wealth could not also be good or neutral, and so with the accumulation of wealth.

Do you have any evidence to back this up? The cutoff for being in the richest 1% globally is about $1 million. What's the evil and exploitation you attribute to the average person with $1mm, who statistically is probably a retiree who had a pretty normal job?

We run sweatshops in poor countries, exploit their people and natural resources to death, then we send them a few crumbs of aid to paint ourselves as the good guys for the history books, how noble of us!

Can you name some of those countries that we've exploited over the last twenty years? Do me a favor and also look up their GDP per capita, or whatever other measure of financial well-being you prefer, and tell me how it's changed over the past two decades. I suspect what you'll find is that they've grown way, way faster than the developed countries who are "exploiting" them.

I'm not suggesting the world doesn't have problems, or that richer countries don't take advantage of poorer countries. But this "rich = evil" drivel is cartoonishly lacking in facts.