It's a little one sided, both in the Reuters piece, and in the media in general. Most journalist and politicians seems focused on the wealthy, but forget that the vast majority of people aren't poor because Mark Zuckerberg is rich.
Sure, the wealthy needs to pay their taxes, just like everyone else, but it's not going to magically pull 2 billion people out of poverty.
> The eight individuals named in the report are [Microsoft's Bill] Gates, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, veteran investor Warren Buffett, Mexico's Carlos Slim, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.
With the exception of Ortega, Buffett and Slim, that's a lot of wealth concentrated in tech. Hmm...
Yeah, i find it always funny when so called futurists say:"The AI Revolution will lead to a few Tech-Barons owning everything without any possible recourse for the rest of society." To which the obvious reply is: "I thought they had already won that battle?
The real issue is here is how much assets with finite supply and cruicial to human existence (e.g. food and water supply, real estate, cruicial technology) can be brought under control of few individuals with such wealth. For example if someone buys the majority of land, there will not be an easy way out even if the monetary wealth distribution will change.
I am wondering why isn't it more often discussed that wealth yields assets that yields even more wealth, because this is how capitalism is set up. This means that the situation cannot be easily improved because wealthy individuals have supeior knowledge and assets to enrich themselves further.
I don't care how rich the rich are as long as our systems are set up to guarantee a minimum level of access to basic resources including housing, drinkable water, food, internet access, safety, healthcare and education.
As long as these minimums are guaranteed with a large buffer (and every century the minimums go up) I am fine with the wealthy having a lot of money. In our system, the banks invest that money anyway, when the rich aren't using it. These investments represent belief about future demand -- which may result more and more in a plutocracy. But as long as the rest of humanity lives comfortably, I don't care.
Safety nets produce real choice. They allow you to spend time raising your kids and educating them. The kids can join the new knowledge-based workforce. You can as well, since you can take time off to learn. We can maybe travel to the stars.
But without the basic guarantees (vouchers, single payer based) many people are stuck in dead end jobs or worse, grinding poverty. It's like a poker tournament where most people have a really small stack AND can't afford to fly out of the tournament. So much wasted opportunity for human knowledge.
The other thing is smashing the knowledge silos - patents on drugs etc. The way science and open source grew is that anyone could stand on the shoulders of giants and their contributons added to the growing body of knowledge. That's how you serve the long tail eg cure malaria the same way wikipedia has articles on obscure topics and linux runs on toasters. Public platforms outperform private ones.
To sum up: tax the robots, guarantee the basic safety net, put education online and use colleges for tutoring and certification only, promote patentleft for drugs and open source for software.
However looking at the 8 names on the list, non of them are great land owners or the inheritors of massive fortunes or business empires. They're 'normal' hard working people who came up with a clever idea and worked really really hard (and got very lucky)
This is an incredibly misleading statistic because they use NET wealth, which means that they subtract your debt from your wealth. That means that if you have more debt than wealth (not necessarily a bad thing), you have negative wealth. This is the case for roughly 40% of the world's population.
This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than the poorest 2.85 billion people in the world. It's also the same metric Donald Trump used in that story his daughter liked to tell, about him walking past a homeless person and saying "that guy is 700 million dollars richer than me".
Income and wealth inequality is a huge problem, but stats like these are incredibly misleading and shouldn't be used to make the argument.
> This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than the poorest 2.85 billion people in the world.
But isn't that true? If you are not born into a family that will give you a huge dept and a second mortgage on the house, you are better of.
The eight individuals named in the report are Gates, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, veteran investor Warren Buffett, Mexico's Carlos Slim, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.
If poverty if viewed as a lack of resources for certain individuals, then understanding the allocation and distribution of resourced over all of humanity is relevant as a means to understand the problem.
Oxfam released a similar stat last year, and the BBC's More or Less team didn't think much of it. The wealth numbers they're using aren't necessarily well-behaved when they're totted up the way Oxfam has done, as there are a lot of cases where wealth as-measured isn't an intuitive measure of "richness". For example, a new graduate with tens of thousands in loan debt will still have a chance at better long-term income than someone with neither the qualification nor the loan who has higher numeric worth.
That said, it's harder to find examples where the a high wealth implies a low buying power, so this doesn't necessarily contradict the crux of the piece. Either way, it's worth being skeptical of misapplied statistics.
These measures I don't think are a good way to measure, because I think there's a difference between someone who's very wealthy on paper because of high stock prices, and someone whose's wealth because they got a disproportionate share of income. The latter represents money diverted in the here and now to someone else, and the former represents money that can be diverted in the future. Of course, you can ask Elizabeth Holmes how much of a billionaire she is now with Theranos, as an example of how paper wealth doesn't always translate.
It's possible for someone to be very IPO stock rich, but not actually have received much income. This is especially true for founders who started with their stock, instead of being given it as a bonus.
Agreed. It's still an indicator, although it shouldn't be taken alone. The yearly energy consumption of a person is another that is often recognized as relevant, especially since the duration of our species is now determined by our glasshouse gas emissions.
What if those 8 people spent all of their wealth buying goods and services from those poor people?
To spend all of that wealth, every fish would have to be caught, every forest mowed down, every drop of oil burned, to have enough natural resources to spend all of that money.
I'm sure I'm wrong and others will correct me, but I still can't help but feel it's in some ways good that the wealth is so concentrated it can never be fully spent.
note that half of that lot have given pretty much all their wealth to charity. There is an argument that their ability to deploy that wealth to good effect is far greater than that of the american govt? In away - its a very positive message
The alternative would have been to tax them more and use the tax results to help people. Let's compare:
Taxes:
- Predictable income
- Democratic control over the spending
- Big risk of misuse due to lobbying
Charity:
- No predictability, depends on the whim of those who could spend
- No democratic control
- Small risk of misuse due to lobbying
I welcome everyone to add to both lists. From my comment history it should be pretty clear that I'm not a fan of hoping that those with money are in a charitable mood, but I know there's a strong faction with an opposing view of the world, which could help balancing such a list.
"I (/my company) should be allowed to avoid my taxes because the government will just waste the money" Is a pretty antidemocratic sentiment. You may think it's inefficient but you're a constituency of one and you don't get to make that call for everyone in the country.
[+] [-] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13407794
[+] [-] mrweasel|9 years ago|reply
Sure, the wealthy needs to pay their taxes, just like everyone else, but it's not going to magically pull 2 billion people out of poverty.
[+] [-] theRhino|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdog|9 years ago|reply
With the exception of Ortega, Buffett and Slim, that's a lot of wealth concentrated in tech. Hmm...
[+] [-] Roritharr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miguelrochefort|9 years ago|reply
How is this surprising?
[+] [-] bostand|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karol|9 years ago|reply
I am wondering why isn't it more often discussed that wealth yields assets that yields even more wealth, because this is how capitalism is set up. This means that the situation cannot be easily improved because wealthy individuals have supeior knowledge and assets to enrich themselves further.
[+] [-] EGreg|9 years ago|reply
I don't care how rich the rich are as long as our systems are set up to guarantee a minimum level of access to basic resources including housing, drinkable water, food, internet access, safety, healthcare and education.
As long as these minimums are guaranteed with a large buffer (and every century the minimums go up) I am fine with the wealthy having a lot of money. In our system, the banks invest that money anyway, when the rich aren't using it. These investments represent belief about future demand -- which may result more and more in a plutocracy. But as long as the rest of humanity lives comfortably, I don't care.
Safety nets produce real choice. They allow you to spend time raising your kids and educating them. The kids can join the new knowledge-based workforce. You can as well, since you can take time off to learn. We can maybe travel to the stars.
But without the basic guarantees (vouchers, single payer based) many people are stuck in dead end jobs or worse, grinding poverty. It's like a poker tournament where most people have a really small stack AND can't afford to fly out of the tournament. So much wasted opportunity for human knowledge.
The other thing is smashing the knowledge silos - patents on drugs etc. The way science and open source grew is that anyone could stand on the shoulders of giants and their contributons added to the growing body of knowledge. That's how you serve the long tail eg cure malaria the same way wikipedia has articles on obscure topics and linux runs on toasters. Public platforms outperform private ones.
To sum up: tax the robots, guarantee the basic safety net, put education online and use colleges for tutoring and certification only, promote patentleft for drugs and open source for software.
[+] [-] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply
(which is thematically centered on wealth concentration)
[+] [-] dagw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OskarS|9 years ago|reply
This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than the poorest 2.85 billion people in the world. It's also the same metric Donald Trump used in that story his daughter liked to tell, about him walking past a homeless person and saying "that guy is 700 million dollars richer than me".
Income and wealth inequality is a huge problem, but stats like these are incredibly misleading and shouldn't be used to make the argument.
[+] [-] aluhut|9 years ago|reply
But isn't that true? If you are not born into a family that will give you a huge dept and a second mortgage on the house, you are better of.
[+] [-] ckastner|9 years ago|reply
The eight individuals named in the report are Gates, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, veteran investor Warren Buffett, Mexico's Carlos Slim, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.
[+] [-] topbanana|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bprieto|9 years ago|reply
It isn't if you care about your message and narrative.
[+] [-] i_cannot_hack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treuherz|9 years ago|reply
That said, it's harder to find examples where the a high wealth implies a low buying power, so this doesn't necessarily contradict the crux of the piece. Either way, it's worth being skeptical of misapplied statistics.
Sources: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26613682 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03fj84x
[+] [-] cromwellian|9 years ago|reply
It's possible for someone to be very IPO stock rich, but not actually have received much income. This is especially true for founders who started with their stock, instead of being given it as a bonus.
[+] [-] tajen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|9 years ago|reply
I thought poverty was down! I would rather fight inequality by eliminating poverty. Tax the robots and redistribute wealth to social safety nets!
[+] [-] snarfy|9 years ago|reply
To spend all of that wealth, every fish would have to be caught, every forest mowed down, every drop of oil burned, to have enough natural resources to spend all of that money.
I'm sure I'm wrong and others will correct me, but I still can't help but feel it's in some ways good that the wealth is so concentrated it can never be fully spent.
[+] [-] maxerickson|9 years ago|reply
These incredibly wealthy people have captured a very small slice of overall human productivity.
[+] [-] collin_u_out|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imglorp|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge
[+] [-] theRhino|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgift|9 years ago|reply
Taxes:
Charity: I welcome everyone to add to both lists. From my comment history it should be pretty clear that I'm not a fan of hoping that those with money are in a charitable mood, but I know there's a strong faction with an opposing view of the world, which could help balancing such a list.[+] [-] domfletcher|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imglorp|9 years ago|reply
The (Buffet and) Gates foundation, for example, have reported new malaria cases are down 25 pct globally.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mala...
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nepotism2016|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easytiger|9 years ago|reply