85 richest people have as much wealth as 3.5 billion poorest

[Deleted]

The Walten family has about the same wealth as 40% of the entire USA. That is 6 people afaik....so yea......and they made this money screwing people over and buying politicians.


You guys realize that wealth inequality has become worse over the years right? And you do know why this happened right?

It is a sad world we live in, people defending the most powerful humans and corp...(oh wait the same) instead of having empathy for the powerless. Have fun paying more because Goldman Sachs screws with the price of Aluminium while you tell people be less poor.

Nah, Im not defending them Im just saying that it isn't right to take their stuff away just because they're mean and refuse to share.

[Deleted]

Ok, maybe but it's a necessary evil. People are individuals first and part of a society second so their first obligations are to themselves and their family/loved ones. So it really isn't anyones business to tell them how much they can keep and how much they should give away. Same rules should apply to everyone.

That's the point. They have different rules because they have money and power. They got lapdogs in form of spineless politicians. I just gave you an example of the Walten family that DOES NOT deserve their money.

The only reason why they can get more rich is because they are screwing over everyone else!

[MildCore]

Because it's bad for the overall health of society when there is a massive disparity in wealth.

What's bad to the overall health of society is people's inability to open their minds and question everything.

[Deleted]

A well reasoned response, I am probably just too dense to derive as much meaning from those periods as you doubtless put into them. I am confused as to what part of the quoted statement you objected too? Do you feel the worlds wealth has not increased in the last millenia? Perhaps you feel poverty is a new issue that only showed up once cable news started showing it? Or perhaps you are confusing finite resources with finite wealth, the world definitely has finite resources, but those 85 people do not control anywhere close to the same percentage of the planets resources as they do the planets wealth. Perhaps you meant something different all together, but I unfortunately can't read lines of dots as well as you can write them.

Claiming that something finite is infinite is dense no words. Just because something can grow doesnt mean its infinite or that the distribution of it cant get skewed to a point where its just utterly criminal.

Wealth is finite and its limited by the current development of technology or resources.
Currency on the other Hand well we can add almost as many zeros behind as we want.

[Deleted]

Nah, Im not defending them Im just saying that it isn't right to take their stuff away just because they're mean and refuse to share.

I don't want their money. I want a fair system.

[SilvaAger]

Money and wealth doesn't equal happiness and fulfillment.
/thread
^I've never done this before, but I feel it's due here.

[Deleted]

Ah, but the "hate the rich" happens a lot these days, yet give millions to one of those people and they'll quickly shut up. It's envy, of course it is and I don't blame them at all....who doesn't want to be rich? It gives ultimate freedom over one's life.

I don't want to be rich. I just want enough to live a comfortable life. Past a certain point more money doesn't help you at all. Do I need 100 billion? No, and I don't want it either. It actually ends up giving you more problems than benefits. Money doesn't buy happiness. The less you have, the less you have to worry about. Diogenes of Sinope?

[Daelak]

Nah, Im not defending them Im just saying that it isn't right to take their stuff away just because they're mean and refuse to share.

No, societies around the world have the mutually agreed upon right via their representative governments to increase taxation levels so they can increase public spending, instead of it being in private hands.

[Deleted]

What's bad to the overall health of society is people's inability to open their minds and question everything.

People think it is because of jealousy or that we want communism. The only thing I want is that the system isn't rigged and workers get their fair share.

We are going back in time. In Germany back in the early 1900s Ernst Abbe (leading Carl Zeiss) introduced the 8 hour work day 5 days a week. Workers got a share of all profits earned. Why? Ernst Abbe had the opinion that since they are a crucial part in making that money and that without them the company wouldn't exsist they earned it.

Where are we now?

[NuLogic]

What's up with all these rich people threads?

[Deleted]

Money and wealth doesn't equal happiness and fulfillment.
/thread
^I've never done this before, but I feel it's due here.

No, but a moderate amount can make your life much easier.

[Elegiac]

Ok, maybe but it's a necessary evil. People are individuals first and part of a society second so their first obligations are to themselves and their family/loved ones. So it really isn't anyones business to tell them how much they can keep and how much they should give away. Same rules should apply to everyone.

Complete bullshit. Humans have -always- depended on social structures for their survival, even in prehistoric times. Man is a social animal, as the saying goes.

What makes someone's property -their- property, in your view?

[Thekri]

The Walten family has about the same wealth as 40% of the entire USA. That is 6 people afaik....so yea......and they made this money screwing people over and buying politicians.

Where did you come up with this number? Our GPD is 16.6 Trillion right now, if the Waltons had 40% of that they would be trillionares, or approximately 25 times richer than Bill Gates each, or do you mean that if you add the wealth of the lowest 40% of American citizens together you get the same amount of money as the Walton heirs have, which is essentially saying the exact same thing as the OP, except the OPs is pretty reasonable, and I don't know where you got your facts from. However since 40% of America isn't starving, and the only reason they have serious quality of life issues is due to artificially inflated cost of living in the US, I don't see how it is a problem at all.

Now since their is about 800 million people in the world that ARE starving (according to worldhunger.org), I would say it is a major problem globally, but in America it is more a problem with people being jealous than an actual systemic problem.

[xindralol]

hmm such 'statistics' are generally pretty useless ...

[Daelak]

hmm such 'statistics' are generally pretty useless ...

Said random person on the internet

[Deleted]

Money and wealth doesn't equal happiness and fulfillment.
/thread
^I've never done this before, but I feel it's due here.

Sweet. I bet that makes homeless people starving and freezing on the streets feel a lot better. There's another saying aswell. Dont known exactly how it translates to english but lets try.

''money doesnt equal happiness, but big money can make misery go away''

[Elegiac]

hmm such 'statistics' are generally pretty useless ...

As opposed to what? The anecdotal evidence of Joe Shithead?

[Kalcheus]

Are the numbers actually "wealth" or "worth"? Because there's a huge difference between the two.

[Deleted]

Complete bullshit. Humans have -always- depended on social structures for their survival, even in prehistoric times. Man is a social animal, as the saying goes.

What makes someone's property -their- property, in your view?

Use common sense.. everything you earn or is given to you freely(inheritance etc.) is yours. A perfect society wouldn't have any taxes at all which is completely possible with government jobs, infrastructure and automation to guarantee that basic needs are met for everyone. Hell, even forced prisoner labor is a better solution that raising taxes.

[Yvaelle]

Sounds good, but the world is not a pizza. There isn't a finite amount of wealth on the planet at all, the amount of wealth that exists right now is vastly greater than what existed 100 years ago, which was more than 100 years before that and so forth.

The amount of wealth which has cumulatively been attained so far is pizza (meaning it is a finite sum). That wealth can be extracted from the planet at a finite rate, and that the rate can accelerate over time (via improvements in technology and labour practices, both of which are finite) does not change that wealth is finite. Bill Gates (to continue to use him as example) is fabulously rich, richer perhaps than any human can comprehend spare through abstraction - but he is not infinitely rich - nor will any human ever be.

There is a finite amount of wealth on the planet and there always will be. This is because there are limits to the rate of extraction and generation, limits to the rate of technological and productivity advancement, limits to amount of (for example) Oil in the ground, and limits to the population which the planet can support (and thereby, limits to the amount of labour which can be performed). Wealth is always finite.

The issue is that as the wealth has grown it hasn't grown everywhere. Third world nations aren't really any poorer than they were 1,000 years ago, but they aren't much richer either. So it isn't that the rich people are taking everyone elses pizza, it is that rich societies are making more pizza (Which leaves the US/Europe/First World nations with a lot more pizza per capita),

Yes, they are. Halliburton doesn't just take oil from say, the US (where they are from) they take it from Libya and Iraq and Mexico. Similarly, the value of labour is being 'taken' by the wealthy as well - at every level. For example, Nike profits ~$2 Billion a year - is that wealth distributed evenly based upon the labour and innovations made by the employees? Unlikely. The engineers and sales teams, the middle and upper managers likely do the lion's share of the corporate work - both in labour and innovation - but they don't receive an equal share of the profit - which overwhelmingly goes to shareholders and executives: even the junior executives are being vastly underpaid in terms of labour/innovation - given the amount of profit the company generates. Further down the chain, Nike employees some of the lowest labour practices in the world - despite that sweatshops produce their high quality product at trivial cost - they receive an almost non-existent return of the profit of their venture. This should hopefully illustrate that both labour and innovation are not significant factors in the distribution of wealth. Rather, the most significant factor in the distribution of wealth, is the possession of wealth.

The rich are not making more pizza (a combination of extraction of resources and labour), they are Taking more pizza. Rich societies (even though there really is no such thing, America for example is not collectively rich) are more efficient and effective (via technology and labour practices) at producing pizza/wealth - yet that is irrelevant - because they do not share in the wealth. The same inequality which exists globally is almost mirrored in the inequality within America. Globally, the 10% richest control 85% of the wealth - within America, it's something along the lines of the 20% richest control 85% of the wealth.

By comparison to the richest in the world, Americans (or anyone else) are not significantly richer than Liberians. Whether you make $50,000 a year or $5,000 - you are still poor in the eyes of billionaires (and soon to be Trillionaires). If the richest 100 (not even the top 1%, the top 0.000007%) people on Earth paid 25% income tax for just one year, they could end global poverty (for ~3 billion people) in just forever. After which they could go back to paying no taxes the very next year - but no human would ever again live in poverty. The difference in wealth between average Liberians and average Americans is essentially trivial in the eyes of the very rich.

I have no claim on Bill Gates pizza, he just got a lot more than I did. And third world nations have the same amount of pizza they always had,

No, they don't - they labour for the benefit of the very rich - to extract resources that should belong to them (assuming we believe in the soverignty of nations, but lets avoid that detour for the moment). They are making their own pizza labouring ~12-20 hour days - extracting resources which belong to them, labouring just as they would if they were to make it for themselves - but then (in effect) tithing the lion's share to the very rich - and that is just as true of Bangladeshi seamstresses as it is of Google office-workers.

which looks really unfair right now, since everyone else has lots of pizza. And yes this is a problem, but it isn't a pizza stealing problem.

Yes, it really is. I think you are still caught in thinking the very rich are labouring of innovating at like ~30 million times the rate of everyone else - but Bill Gates (I feel like I'm picking on him, but I'm really not) doesn't work 360,000,000 hour days against your 12 hour shifts - nor does he innovate at an equally preposterous rate to what you do. It is very much a distribution problem - a logistics of wealth problem, if you will - not a problem of the lazy Chinese workers only putting in 18 hour days, or the lazy Apple engineers simply being 30,000,000 times less brilliant than Steve Jobs (or more appropriately perhaps, Steve Wozyniak).

In short - the disribution of wealth is untethered from the distribution of labour, and the distribution of innovation. There is no correlation.