Someone should introduce an economical concept equivalent to escape velocity in physics.
If you throw an object towards space from Earth, it will always fall back to Earth, unless you throw it with enough speed (IIRC something close to 11km/s), with which it will eventually "escape" Earth's gravity.
I have a feeling that money follow the same rule: If you have some money but below a certain level, and don't do anything, that amount of money will be eaten by you, taxes, and inflation. But if you have enough money, current rates mean that taxes & inflation will erode your capital slower than the interest you'll earn from that capital alone, and so money is inevitably growing on itself.
As a society, we should prevent "escape capital" to be a thing.
I totally fail to understand why this is a polarizing issue as 99.5% of people are on the same side of the threshold...
Oxfam carefully picked the dates they used to make the gain as large as possible. They used November 2023 compared to March 2020. What happened in March of 2020? The stock market dropped from 3380 (Feb 10) to 2304 (March 16). For the end date, if they had used Oct 30 instead of November, the S&P was at 4358. The Using the numbers I just gave, the gain would only be 29%, not 114%. That's a huge difference. (As you probably suspect, I also carefully picked the dates I used to minimize the gain.)
Yeah, Oxfam have been pushing a bunch of similar misleading claims using the same trick, such as arguing that people across the world lost vast amounts of pay during the pandemic even as the rich got richer by a vast amount and insinuating this was money that was somehow redistributed from one group to the other. Of course, this is just using the fact that share prices anticipate future changes in the economy to measure from close to the bottom of the pandemic-induced drop, which happened right around when the pandemic was first declared and it was just starting to affect people, and there is no actual mechanism by which money could be transferred in such a fashion. The money lost in pay was essentially destroyed; people didn't work, didn't produce things, and the real global economy of stuff available to purchase shrunk by if anything much more than that (due to furlough, unemployment, inputs other than labour, etc). The increase in wealth of the super-rich similarly was not transferred from anywhere, it was just the valuation of things they already owned going up due to the price shares were trading at increasing. This didn't mean an equal sum of money was somehow transferred into the stock market to do this.
I also see very innocuous reasons for selecting those dates: for instance if you want to show what happened "since COVID hit us" this is indeed the fully correct choice.
But irrespective of the dates chosen, even your carefully selected counter-data shows a 30% increase in wealth for the richest in about 2 1/2 years. Even those of us dabbling in stocks must find this increase mind-boggling, also as it continues a seemingly indefinite trend. The rich are getting richer, whether it's by 30% or 100% in 2 years it is damaging to our societies and means millions more continue to suffer as resources are used for private enrichment at a level that does not even bring these rich anything beyond vanity value.
The stock market dropped 30% from Feb-March 2020, and then recovered it's Feb value by Aug 2020. The Feb-Aug "increase" is really a recovery. Endpoints are always a little arbitrary but this was really egregious.
My own end-dates, picked for convenience rather than ideology[0]:
S&P500 Jan 2 2020 close: 3,257
S&P500 Jan 2 2024 close: 4,742
Increase: 1,485, which is 45% up from 2020, annualized that's ~9.7% (1.45^0.25). That's actually the historical norm.
There's a lot more in this report than just that one headline stat, but one does wonder about the reliability of everything else as well (and I can't fact-check everything). If we assume the worst they do is cherry-pick endpoints that means graphs could be trustworthy, but basically any numerical text statement (of which there are many) is unreliable.
[0] I guess I can't prove this but I picked the dates while only having an approximate idea of the numbers.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but they also seem to adjust for inflation when talking about the poor getting poorer “in real terms” but didn’t do the same for the rich people getting richer.
The Guardian is pretty left wing so they're not going to look too closely at the numbers if they say what they want them to say. These kind of articles always imply that it's some kind of zero sum game which irks me because that's so clearly not true.
Easy - just compare the size of the list from 2020-21 to 2023.
> 2,640 billionaires with a total net wealth of $12.2 trillion in 2023
> 2,668 billionaires with a total net wealth of $12.7 trillion in 2022
> 2,755 billionaires with a total net wealth of $13.1 trillion in 2021
That makes it what atleast 115 billionaires who lost wealth from 2021-23. There would be more with newer entrants.
A word about how Forbes calculate billionaires[1]. If a person is a brand and makes $100M or so a year, they are counted as a billionaire too.[2][3](from the same article).
If the stock goes up due to low interest rates, how does it makes it a wealth transfer? Snowflake was valued at 100x revenue at one point. Then market corrected and brought it down to say 10x. Whoever was holding it saw their wealth reduced by 10x. Do you think this wealth was transfered to someone else? To who?
A lot of people will complain after reading articles like this one. It is quite hopeless to even try to get a discussion going about what could be a better system. As long as even small tweaks are out of the question, I guess it will only get worse in the future.
One thing I’m curious about that these articles never go into: what is the eventual physical utility of all this stored wealth? As an analogy, if money is like potential energy when kept in the form of financial instruments and real estate, what is its first eventual “kinetic” form after belonging to a billionaire?
For example, if you were to trace all of Rockefeller’s fortune after his death, I would imagine most of it initially went to his heirs. But eventually, at least part of the wealth diffused out of the bloodline, and if you were to go through and account for the physical utility of that money, what would it look like? Labor to create superyachts and exotic sports cars? New buildings on college campuses? Cancer research?
It would be nice if we had a system that quantifies this somehow, because in addition to the problems created by wealth inequality, I would argue that there are sufficiently many inefficiencies in most governmental bureaucracies as to result in a similarly poor usage of money as a billionaire who spends some of their wealth to construct a mansion on a private island.
To play devil’s advocate, suppose we have a hypothetical billionaire that never spends any of their money on luxury or excess but rather devotes most of their time to figuring out how to use their wealth in a way that extracts maximum humanitarian value from it. You could argue that what constitutes “humanitarian value” is totally subjective and that decisions concerning such a large amount of money shouldn’t be left to one person. But on the flip side, would you say that most governments succeed at representing the average person’s desire for utilizing tax revenue in a way that optimally benefits society? Do they accomplish this efficiently?
I don’t know the answer and don’t really have a strong opinion either way without further research, but sometimes I wonder if despite the problems they cause, billionaires sort of represent the “exploration” part of “exploration vs exploitation” in reinforcement learning, as they slightly destabilize a societal system that might otherwise be stuck in a rut or a local optimum.
I think your hunch is correct very unequal distribution of money leads to economic inefficiency since the money is hoarded (or put into financial instruments or luxurious real estate) and does not trickle to the rest of the economy. Even if on average things are fine (they're not really), if the average citizen is getting left behind you're slowly eroding the middle class and democracy.
The problem is that money is power if you want to define power as "the ability to make things happen"
So the only fact of having the ability to do something alters a lot of financial and social interactions and this depends too on the public perception of the person
Think Gates and Musk, I don't think there is a way to quantify that
> You could argue that what constitutes “humanitarian value” is totally subjective and that decisions concerning such a large amount of money shouldn’t be left to one person. But on the flip side, would you say that most governments actually succeed at representing the average person’s desire for utilizing tax revenue in a way that optimally benefits society? Do they accomplish this efficiently?
Humanitarian value is also quite a broad range. Is someone a worse person for devoting themselves to world hunger while ignoring cancer research? I would say of course not.
As for the question of one person vs a nominally democratically elected government, the western liberal perspective is that government should be by the people for the people, from which it kind of follows that a government that's elected by the people is a better representation of the will of the people than one person who answers to no one but themselves (this also goes for multinational corporations which also effectively answer to no one - yes, they may get fined in certain jurisdictions, but they can navigate where they do business to carve out the fines they'll accept and those they won't).
Where I feel we got it wrong in modern society, especially in the US, is that the centralization of power in a single national government has led to an impossible problem of balancing the competing interests of a vastly diverse country (you see this a bit in the EU as well, where the interests of western and central European countries can be at odds at times, but the EU is more loosely bound than the US). Distributing more of that power to the states/counties/cities would enable decision-making better-tailored to a more comprehensible demographic. It also gives more people the opportunity to participate in governing themselves (that "by the people" part). Only so many people can sit in the Senate, but there are a -lot- of city council positions across the country.
> what is the eventual physical utility of all this stored wealth? As an analogy, if money is like potential energy when kept in the form of financial instruments and real estate, what is its first eventual “kinetic” form after belonging to a billionaire?
Money is just a proxy for power (as are things like title to real estate, equity ownership in a business, board seats, etc).
The utility is just that, the power to do something. Obviously, greatly depends on the one wielding it, but also on the environment (status of civilization, courts, relationships, orderly societies, wars, availability of resources).
Note that all of these abstractions for power mean nothing if other people do not respect them. I take that to mean “wealth”, in a way, is a measure of how orderly a society (or world) is, regardless of how unfairly distributed it is.
the equivalence between money and energy or any other physical quantity is wrong. Money can be literally destroyed in a second, without leaving any trace.
The vast majority of money goes nowhere, it loses value because of inflation, or just pumps up price of stuff that is used for living, such as housing, without "producing" absolutely nothing.
It's not. Money (as in paper or digits) has "intrinsically" no value. It's a sort of game of chairs (and accounting) that society is living with because we have no alternative. It does seem that it has potential energy because society has decided so: People will recognize your money with their potential energy. In a sense, inflation is people distrust in the system. Hyper-inflation is people refusing to work with the system.
> what is the eventual physical utility of all this stored wealth?
You can't store wealth in money or bonds. If you want to store real wealth, you should try storing useful everyday things like water. But then you'll have storage costs and redistribution issues. If you store phones, they'll quickly lose value. That's why people use money despite the government continuously debasing it.
> I would argue that there are sufficiently many inefficiencies in most governmental bureaucracies as to result in a similarly poor usage of money as a billionaire who spends some of their wealth to construct a mansion on a private island.
Exactly. A billionaire that is living in a studio and cooking his food is exerting the same tax on society of a Starbucks barista. On the other hand, a millionaire with a yacht, is very taxing on society. If you have a housing shortage, it makes more sense for people to build houses for themselves and not yachts.
> I don’t know the answer and don’t really have a strong opinion either way without further research
No one does, really. No one understands this at the micro-level as the economy is an emergent phenomena. The Fed just increase/decrease supply; and is basing its model on the idea that 2% inflation is good (and deflation is bad!).
> but sometimes I wonder if despite the problems they cause, billionaires sort of represent the “exploration” part of “exploration vs exploitation” in reinforcement learning, as they slightly destabilize a societal system that might otherwise be stuck in a rut or a local optimum.
The system will swing. People having equal wealth does not mean prosperity and growth. They might just be stuck there. In this case, it makes sense to throw money at someone (or anyone) who is willing to innovate among the herd.
> To play devil’s advocate, suppose we have a hypothetical billionaire that never spends any of their money on luxury or excess but rather devotes most of their time to figuring out how to use their wealth in a way that extracts maximum humanitarian value from it. You could argue that what constitutes “humanitarian value” is totally subjective and that decisions concerning such a large amount of money shouldn’t be left to one person. But on the flip side, would you say that governments actually succeed at representing the average person’s desire for utilizing tax revenue in a way that optimally benefits society? Do they accomplish this efficiently?
This sounds like Bill Gates. He's chosen humanitarian endeavours that he wants to focus on. I believe its good to have someone who can deploy significant capital on multi-decade projects. Bill Gates doesn't seem like the person who will give up eradicating polio just because he didn't get it done in a term.
However, on the flip side you have Elon Musk buying an influential social media platform...
Articles like these always follow a predictable script:
> Compiled using data from the research company Wealth X and Forbes, it says the combined wealth of the top five richest people in the world have increased by $464bn, or 114%. Over the same period, the total wealth of the poorest 4.77 billion people – making up 60% of the world population – has declined by 0.2% in real terms.
The keyword here is "in real terms" which is doing most of the lifting here. I know not using this term would not realistically make much of a difference, but it changes the hyperbole used in the article.
Then there is this:
> global income inequality was now comparable with that of South Africa, the country with the highest inequality in the world.
South Africa has a GINI index of 63%. It's hard to define range of comparable when Brazil had a GINI index of 53%.
Outlets like The Guardian do more harm to these causes because of such uncritical and clickbait reporting.
I don't know what the specific solution is, but it is a polarizing topic.
I've read a lot of conservative opinions on this, from scholars to your average forum users, and have spoken with people IRL about this topic - and one thing that pops up again and again, is that many conservatives don't see wealth inequality as a problem.
The main argument is that the poor today have it better than N years ago, so the system must be working. And taxing the rich just stems from jealousy. Sprinkled in with just-world hypothesis.
EDIT: My observation is that poor people have easier access to debt today, compared to 30+ year ago. When I grew up - if you were broke, you were broke. You called family or friends, went to the pawn shop, or whatever - banks wouldn't issue you a credit card.
When I went to college, banks were literally throwing credit cards at everyone and their dog. I had zero income, but still got a CC with $5k limit. Never actually used it, but they it took 2 minutes to fill out the form (at the airport), and I got one in the mail a couple of weeks later.
If it was that easy to get a CC, then I guess poor people must have managed to bankroll themselves through bad times, as long as they managed to meet the minimum payments, or get new cards to cover the old ones.
The problem with the poor surviving entirely on debt is that it creates the illusion of stability, so if a stranger looks at their life from the outside they go 'well, Bob's doing fine, he has a car and an apartment and can eat 2-3 times a day.' But then Bob gets sick just enough exactly once, and he gets fired because his employer isn't legally mandated to give him enough sick days or keep him around, and then he gets evicted because he has no savings, and then his car gets repossessed because he can't make the payments without a job, and then he can't get a new job because he needs a car to drive to work from the homeless shelter. And Bob still has 4-5 digits in credit card debt.
Even worse still if he ends up sick enough to be hospitalized. Then he's probably got 5-7 digits worth of medical debts on top of being homeless and jobless.
The problem isn't (IMO) the standard of living for america's poor, it's the precarity. At any moment even a small accident could ruin your life if you're poor in this country.
I don't see the issue with inequality in theory. As long as democracy remains robust and free of influence from the wealthy, and the poor continue to increase in wealth in aggregate. In practise I feel that the wealthy have been exerting undue influence in politics. This, however, can be addressed with targeted policies. It doesn't require restructuring society.
> many conservatives don't see wealth inequality as a problem
Conservatives have never been known for sympathy with the poor. It's basically their schtick: away with this democratic nonsense. That only gives power to the rabble. Back to the glory days of (fighting) the empire!
What I don't get is your debt/CC anecdote. If you cover old debts by getting new ones, you're enlarging your debt (I don't think there's ever been a negative interest on personal debt in the period/society you refer to). That doesn't end well, until the system, which usually involves the government, as the market doesn't give a damn, manages to change your fortunes.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics ... unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
I feel like it needs an explicit rule for "non-tech articles written, propaganda-lite style, to elicit rightful indignation"
In the past this sort of trajectory has led to bloody revolution. No one should discount that possibility. The tools to prevent it are, as before in the hands of the rich. As before they will probably do nothing.
What I dislike about the current discourse in the American politics is the constant chatter about "reducing expenses". We have $1.7T deficit in 2023, so we would have to find cuts to account for that even if we just wanted to break even. It's nearly impossible.
What about substantially expanding taxation to increase the federal income and fund more socially-responsible programs such as maternal care or child care. So the question is, who is going to pay a bit more? Random Joe who makes $100k/year or someone who sits on >$50B wealth?
Looking at the top 10 list it's dominated by American tech billionaires. Weirdly Steve Ballmer is #10, even though he was "only" CEO of Microsoft, not the founder. So much for the argument that the wealth comes from innovation and risk taking that I sometimes hear.
I hate this world. I hate that this is what all this has led up to. We've accomplished at lot of science, empowering tech, and social justice through collective effort, but it hasn't been enough.
I hope for a new destabilizing tech that happens so fast and so rapidly, that those at the top will have no idea how to corner the markets emerging from it, and that the tech is so groundbreaking that it makes the existence of these vampires wholly irrelevant.
People won't stop buying and/or using these products/services, because exactly what you said:
> They became rich because they built something valuable that a lot of people give them $$$ for. We the population made them rich.
There isn't many EV cars <$40k that can have >250mi range. There aren't many other powerful social networks as Facebook that can let people connect with their friends and families.
An average Joe doesn't care about Elon nor Zuckerberg. Sure, they probably heard about Elon and his recent shenanigans, but it isn't much of a factor when purchasing a good/service.
As a result, we can't rely on just society regulating wealth.
[+] [-] d--b|2 years ago|reply
If you throw an object towards space from Earth, it will always fall back to Earth, unless you throw it with enough speed (IIRC something close to 11km/s), with which it will eventually "escape" Earth's gravity.
I have a feeling that money follow the same rule: If you have some money but below a certain level, and don't do anything, that amount of money will be eaten by you, taxes, and inflation. But if you have enough money, current rates mean that taxes & inflation will erode your capital slower than the interest you'll earn from that capital alone, and so money is inevitably growing on itself.
As a society, we should prevent "escape capital" to be a thing.
I totally fail to understand why this is a polarizing issue as 99.5% of people are on the same side of the threshold...
[+] [-] lorax|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makomk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lock-the-spock|2 years ago|reply
But irrespective of the dates chosen, even your carefully selected counter-data shows a 30% increase in wealth for the richest in about 2 1/2 years. Even those of us dabbling in stocks must find this increase mind-boggling, also as it continues a seemingly indefinite trend. The rich are getting richer, whether it's by 30% or 100% in 2 years it is damaging to our societies and means millions more continue to suffer as resources are used for private enrichment at a level that does not even bring these rich anything beyond vanity value.
[+] [-] DonsDiscountGas|2 years ago|reply
My own end-dates, picked for convenience rather than ideology[0]: S&P500 Jan 2 2020 close: 3,257 S&P500 Jan 2 2024 close: 4,742 Increase: 1,485, which is 45% up from 2020, annualized that's ~9.7% (1.45^0.25). That's actually the historical norm.
There's a lot more in this report than just that one headline stat, but one does wonder about the reliability of everything else as well (and I can't fact-check everything). If we assume the worst they do is cherry-pick endpoints that means graphs could be trustworthy, but basically any numerical text statement (of which there are many) is unreliable.
[0] I guess I can't prove this but I picked the dates while only having an approximate idea of the numbers.
[+] [-] ccorcos|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beej71|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thefz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Neil44|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itchycoo-park|2 years ago|reply
What we did over those years will be recorded as one of the single biggest wealth transfers in history.
[+] [-] zpeti|2 years ago|reply
Massive amounts of wealth were "lost"
Of course they weren't actually lost, it's just that the fed started increasing interest rates and the stock market tanked.
Did wealth transfer to the poor? No.
So did these people "transfer wealth" from the poor from 2020 to 2022?
[+] [-] ankit219|2 years ago|reply
> 2,640 billionaires with a total net wealth of $12.2 trillion in 2023
> 2,668 billionaires with a total net wealth of $12.7 trillion in 2022
> 2,755 billionaires with a total net wealth of $13.1 trillion in 2021
That makes it what atleast 115 billionaires who lost wealth from 2021-23. There would be more with newer entrants.
A word about how Forbes calculate billionaires[1]. If a person is a brand and makes $100M or so a year, they are counted as a billionaire too.[2][3](from the same article).
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-09/adam-n... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-30/two-si... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-10-26/musk-w...
If the stock goes up due to low interest rates, how does it makes it a wealth transfer? Snowflake was valued at 100x revenue at one point. Then market corrected and brought it down to say 10x. Whoever was holding it saw their wealth reduced by 10x. Do you think this wealth was transfered to someone else? To who?
[+] [-] arrowsmith|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryzvonusef|2 years ago|reply
paper gains paper losses
[+] [-] lifestyleguru|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw123123123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dtnewman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dah00n|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xcelerate|2 years ago|reply
For example, if you were to trace all of Rockefeller’s fortune after his death, I would imagine most of it initially went to his heirs. But eventually, at least part of the wealth diffused out of the bloodline, and if you were to go through and account for the physical utility of that money, what would it look like? Labor to create superyachts and exotic sports cars? New buildings on college campuses? Cancer research?
It would be nice if we had a system that quantifies this somehow, because in addition to the problems created by wealth inequality, I would argue that there are sufficiently many inefficiencies in most governmental bureaucracies as to result in a similarly poor usage of money as a billionaire who spends some of their wealth to construct a mansion on a private island.
To play devil’s advocate, suppose we have a hypothetical billionaire that never spends any of their money on luxury or excess but rather devotes most of their time to figuring out how to use their wealth in a way that extracts maximum humanitarian value from it. You could argue that what constitutes “humanitarian value” is totally subjective and that decisions concerning such a large amount of money shouldn’t be left to one person. But on the flip side, would you say that most governments succeed at representing the average person’s desire for utilizing tax revenue in a way that optimally benefits society? Do they accomplish this efficiently?
I don’t know the answer and don’t really have a strong opinion either way without further research, but sometimes I wonder if despite the problems they cause, billionaires sort of represent the “exploration” part of “exploration vs exploitation” in reinforcement learning, as they slightly destabilize a societal system that might otherwise be stuck in a rut or a local optimum.
[+] [-] weatherlite|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iulioh|2 years ago|reply
So the only fact of having the ability to do something alters a lot of financial and social interactions and this depends too on the public perception of the person
Think Gates and Musk, I don't think there is a way to quantify that
[+] [-] indigochill|2 years ago|reply
Humanitarian value is also quite a broad range. Is someone a worse person for devoting themselves to world hunger while ignoring cancer research? I would say of course not.
As for the question of one person vs a nominally democratically elected government, the western liberal perspective is that government should be by the people for the people, from which it kind of follows that a government that's elected by the people is a better representation of the will of the people than one person who answers to no one but themselves (this also goes for multinational corporations which also effectively answer to no one - yes, they may get fined in certain jurisdictions, but they can navigate where they do business to carve out the fines they'll accept and those they won't).
Where I feel we got it wrong in modern society, especially in the US, is that the centralization of power in a single national government has led to an impossible problem of balancing the competing interests of a vastly diverse country (you see this a bit in the EU as well, where the interests of western and central European countries can be at odds at times, but the EU is more loosely bound than the US). Distributing more of that power to the states/counties/cities would enable decision-making better-tailored to a more comprehensible demographic. It also gives more people the opportunity to participate in governing themselves (that "by the people" part). Only so many people can sit in the Senate, but there are a -lot- of city council positions across the country.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|2 years ago|reply
Money is just a proxy for power (as are things like title to real estate, equity ownership in a business, board seats, etc).
The utility is just that, the power to do something. Obviously, greatly depends on the one wielding it, but also on the environment (status of civilization, courts, relationships, orderly societies, wars, availability of resources).
Note that all of these abstractions for power mean nothing if other people do not respect them. I take that to mean “wealth”, in a way, is a measure of how orderly a society (or world) is, regardless of how unfairly distributed it is.
[+] [-] dariosalvi78|2 years ago|reply
The vast majority of money goes nowhere, it loses value because of inflation, or just pumps up price of stuff that is used for living, such as housing, without "producing" absolutely nothing.
[+] [-] csomar|2 years ago|reply
It's not. Money (as in paper or digits) has "intrinsically" no value. It's a sort of game of chairs (and accounting) that society is living with because we have no alternative. It does seem that it has potential energy because society has decided so: People will recognize your money with their potential energy. In a sense, inflation is people distrust in the system. Hyper-inflation is people refusing to work with the system.
> what is the eventual physical utility of all this stored wealth?
You can't store wealth in money or bonds. If you want to store real wealth, you should try storing useful everyday things like water. But then you'll have storage costs and redistribution issues. If you store phones, they'll quickly lose value. That's why people use money despite the government continuously debasing it.
> I would argue that there are sufficiently many inefficiencies in most governmental bureaucracies as to result in a similarly poor usage of money as a billionaire who spends some of their wealth to construct a mansion on a private island.
Exactly. A billionaire that is living in a studio and cooking his food is exerting the same tax on society of a Starbucks barista. On the other hand, a millionaire with a yacht, is very taxing on society. If you have a housing shortage, it makes more sense for people to build houses for themselves and not yachts.
> I don’t know the answer and don’t really have a strong opinion either way without further research
No one does, really. No one understands this at the micro-level as the economy is an emergent phenomena. The Fed just increase/decrease supply; and is basing its model on the idea that 2% inflation is good (and deflation is bad!).
> but sometimes I wonder if despite the problems they cause, billionaires sort of represent the “exploration” part of “exploration vs exploitation” in reinforcement learning, as they slightly destabilize a societal system that might otherwise be stuck in a rut or a local optimum.
The system will swing. People having equal wealth does not mean prosperity and growth. They might just be stuck there. In this case, it makes sense to throw money at someone (or anyone) who is willing to innovate among the herd.
[+] [-] tikkabhuna|2 years ago|reply
This sounds like Bill Gates. He's chosen humanitarian endeavours that he wants to focus on. I believe its good to have someone who can deploy significant capital on multi-decade projects. Bill Gates doesn't seem like the person who will give up eradicating polio just because he didn't get it done in a term.
However, on the flip side you have Elon Musk buying an influential social media platform...
[+] [-] edpichler|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_username|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drcongo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ankit219|2 years ago|reply
> Compiled using data from the research company Wealth X and Forbes, it says the combined wealth of the top five richest people in the world have increased by $464bn, or 114%. Over the same period, the total wealth of the poorest 4.77 billion people – making up 60% of the world population – has declined by 0.2% in real terms.
The keyword here is "in real terms" which is doing most of the lifting here. I know not using this term would not realistically make much of a difference, but it changes the hyperbole used in the article.
Then there is this:
> global income inequality was now comparable with that of South Africa, the country with the highest inequality in the world.
South Africa has a GINI index of 63%. It's hard to define range of comparable when Brazil had a GINI index of 53%.
Outlets like The Guardian do more harm to these causes because of such uncritical and clickbait reporting.
[+] [-] TrackerFF|2 years ago|reply
I've read a lot of conservative opinions on this, from scholars to your average forum users, and have spoken with people IRL about this topic - and one thing that pops up again and again, is that many conservatives don't see wealth inequality as a problem.
The main argument is that the poor today have it better than N years ago, so the system must be working. And taxing the rich just stems from jealousy. Sprinkled in with just-world hypothesis.
EDIT: My observation is that poor people have easier access to debt today, compared to 30+ year ago. When I grew up - if you were broke, you were broke. You called family or friends, went to the pawn shop, or whatever - banks wouldn't issue you a credit card.
When I went to college, banks were literally throwing credit cards at everyone and their dog. I had zero income, but still got a CC with $5k limit. Never actually used it, but they it took 2 minutes to fill out the form (at the airport), and I got one in the mail a couple of weeks later.
If it was that easy to get a CC, then I guess poor people must have managed to bankroll themselves through bad times, as long as they managed to meet the minimum payments, or get new cards to cover the old ones.
Just an anecdote, of course.
[+] [-] kevingadd|2 years ago|reply
Even worse still if he ends up sick enough to be hospitalized. Then he's probably got 5-7 digits worth of medical debts on top of being homeless and jobless.
The problem isn't (IMO) the standard of living for america's poor, it's the precarity. At any moment even a small accident could ruin your life if you're poor in this country.
[+] [-] Gareth321|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgv|2 years ago|reply
Conservatives have never been known for sympathy with the poor. It's basically their schtick: away with this democratic nonsense. That only gives power to the rabble. Back to the glory days of (fighting) the empire!
What I don't get is your debt/CC anecdote. If you cover old debts by getting new ones, you're enlarging your debt (I don't think there's ever been a negative interest on personal debt in the period/society you refer to). That doesn't end well, until the system, which usually involves the government, as the market doesn't give a damn, manages to change your fortunes.
[+] [-] arrowsmith|2 years ago|reply
That sounds dangerous - did anyone get injured?
[+] [-] sershe|2 years ago|reply
I feel like it needs an explicit rule for "non-tech articles written, propaganda-lite style, to elicit rightful indignation"
[+] [-] beardyw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgh2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bahama_mama|2 years ago|reply
What about substantially expanding taxation to increase the federal income and fund more socially-responsible programs such as maternal care or child care. So the question is, who is going to pay a bit more? Random Joe who makes $100k/year or someone who sits on >$50B wealth?
[+] [-] keester|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciconia|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sorenjan|2 years ago|reply
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/article/the-to...
[+] [-] rwmj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tetris11|2 years ago|reply
I hope for a new destabilizing tech that happens so fast and so rapidly, that those at the top will have no idea how to corner the markets emerging from it, and that the tech is so groundbreaking that it makes the existence of these vampires wholly irrelevant.
[+] [-] nojvek|2 years ago|reply
They became rich because they built something valuable that a lot of people give them $$$ for. We the population made them rich.
The big question is if the top reach is preventing the bottom from becoming rich? That is what we should be against.
US will still keep on churning new billionaires as long as new ideas get to to complete with old ideas on the same grounds.
[+] [-] bahama_mama|2 years ago|reply
> They became rich because they built something valuable that a lot of people give them $$$ for. We the population made them rich.
There isn't many EV cars <$40k that can have >250mi range. There aren't many other powerful social networks as Facebook that can let people connect with their friends and families.
An average Joe doesn't care about Elon nor Zuckerberg. Sure, they probably heard about Elon and his recent shenanigans, but it isn't much of a factor when purchasing a good/service.
As a result, we can't rely on just society regulating wealth.