Study: Billionaires Could End Extreme Poverty 7 Times Over

[Seranthor]

I didn't "handwave" anything away. I asked for proof on a statement that you just proved my point on. He claimed that extreme poverty was under 10%, that shows that at last projection its at 24%

Except you cant read... that 24% was just after 1990... perhaps you should draw your eyes further to the right and look at where it says 9.6% and World Bank Data.

[cparle87]

Maybe, but not even close to the same scale as what they do here. Governance here is the business of stealing from the people. Our current president managed to expand his personal wealth from 1 million to 25 million in the span of about 6 months. He is pretty old too, like in his late 50s or 60s, just finding his stride while busy in office eh? Nah, just a common thief like the rest.

At least in the US, you have effective people. The whitehouse barely functioning at the moment and the country is trucking along like it's nothing, because the people that actually make the country run are all still there doing what they do all the time. The whitehouse is more of a steering committee. I mean people can say what they want, but the US works. It was the same thing in Belgium and Germany who went without governments for a while, nothing doing, in the case of belgium I think it was 4 years lol. You really can't say the same for a lot of countries in africa, they are still picking at the corpse of what the "colonials" left behind with little forward movement even when they are in office for decades, literally.

Yeah, I hadn't considered them. The US beuracracy and such are very well set up, and keep things spinning even if the upper government is in chaos. Reminds me of one of the old Chinese dynasties. The dynasty itself was deteriorating for almost 150 years until by the end the emperor couldn't do bupkiss without a eunuch telling him he could, but the average Chinese wouldn't notice a thing cause the nation itself was running smoothly.

[Deleted]

If you cant earn a living in todays world , which has almost endless possibilities thanks to the internet, you might want to wonder if you arent doing something very, very wrong.

I do wonder how and why all the people here are so angry with rich people. Can you guys tell me more how they - according to you - are responsible for your problems in life?

[Forogil]

There's no proof therefore you can't prove that it continued to go down or that it leveled out or that it started to raise again.

There is a proof - you are just unable to grasp that 1$ is less than 1.9$.

Oh boy non-rich counties -eyeroll-. Its a worldwide problem, not just a rich world problem. What you're arguing is literally "if you're poor who cares" at this point.

No - people living in extreme poverty is currently mostly a problem outside the rich world (the US has a larger percentage in extreme poverty compared to other rich countries - but still below world average). If you had followed the link you had known that.

But you still insist that when you have three lines:
Below 2$ per day,
Below 1.9$ per day
Below 1$ per day
(with slightly different methodology and the 1.9$ per day is the most reliable) that up to 1992 line up so that 1$<1.9$<2$ - as expected.

You then believe that mysteriously the lines will cross and just because less than 10% live below 1.9$ per day it could still be that 24% live below 1$ - because we don't know what happened?

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

I think you should stop rolling your eyes and learn to think, a good start might be to take the test http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018

[Zython]

I think you need to stick to the definition of robbery.

Alright, fine. Would "stole" make you feel better?

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If you cant earn a living in todays world , which has almost endless possibilities thanks to the internet, you might want to wonder if you arent doing something very, very wrong.

I do wonder how and why all the people here are so angry with rich people. Can you guys tell me more how they - according to you - are responsible for your problems in life?

Where do you want us to start?

[Forogil]

For the people that still believe that extreme poverty isn't decreasing, what if Oxfam themselves said that your misunderstandings are part of the problem?

https://www.oxfam.org.uk/media-centr...global-poverty

And gz to the 400,000 or so that escaped extreme poverty since this thread was created.

[Deleted]

Where do you want us to start?

The part where the billionaires are supposedly supposedly responsible for peoples crappy lives.

[Hiricine]

True. The rich would just exploit them all over again.







If that's the case, why do they oppose doing so to begin with? Would be a great way to shut people up, no?

Well if they exploited people to get rich again it would be the poor exploiting the poor.

Also that graph shows no country where someone is in "extreme" poverty. You can't have extreme poverty in countries where the workers are having precipitous rises in productivity.

To the last point, I oppose taking the money and giving it to people because it destroys families, ruins people's motivation, from the point of giving it out, and it is morally wrong to take the money to begin with. Some programs are worse offenders than others,

[Deleted]

"If you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn."

A study that fails to understand a concept so easy. Why many lottery winners are broke again then?

[Player Twelve]

Alright, fine. Would "stole" make you feel better?

No, because that's also not what they're doing. If I'm working, I'm paid for the labor I provide. If I'm buying a product, I'm paying for the product. Nothing was stolen from me in either of these cases.

[Daelak]

i think you have the numbers confused


The consumer-price index leaped 0.5% in January to mark the biggest increase in five months, adding to recent worries about rising inflation. The cost of rent, clothes, gasoline, health care and auto insurance all rose.

After stripping out volatile gas and food, the more closely followed core rate of inflation rose 0.3% last month.


Wage growth after inflation was -.2%

Yes, apologies for that mix up. Thanks

[kail]

The average person could help end poverty. They could lend some effort or contributions to such charities instead of watching Netflix. Instead, the average person (including me) tends to prioritize one's self before others. That's how people are.

[hakujinbakasama]

This argument is under the false belief that poverty is not state based. Sure, if the upper echelons of wealth gave all of their money to the "extreme poor" you would have an interval in which the poverty is reversed by numeric. However, we know that poverty is just as much a result of externals as it is a nominal accounting. Thus, no, the wealthy cannot simply transfer funds and eliminate poverty. Only leftists believe this idiocy.

[Mellrod]

I fail to see how capitalism is fully exploitative. I never said it's perfect, as no system is, but it's damn better than anything else produced. It gives anyone the opportunity to make a decent living. But hey, let's ignore anyone that's doing just well, and focus on the only the supremely rich. Fuck that business guy making a modest salary but staying afloat just fine, let's punish them because there are a few people who are extraordinarily rich.

You may brush it off as just a few flaws, but that undermines the gravity of how much corruption there is now. We have gotten to a point in the U.S. where greedy companies pretty much run our government - lobbying in and de-clawing departments meant to keep the companies in check, manipulating blue collar workers and have them working in shit conditions/prioritizing undocumented workers because they're easier to manipulate, abusing the environment, extorting small towns, communities, and people for precious resources all over the globe, and generally trying to keep the public in the dark about so many things which in turn has us unwittingly feeding this self-destructive engine. Not many people are able to even 'stay afloat' financially anymore. There also is very little diversity and competition in companies that provide us with products now. For example, back in the day you had a lot of small business competing, but today they have all evaporated or been bought out by the bigger fish in the sea. Most modern food & beverage products can be traced back to Tyson, Pepsi-Cola, Dole, Nestle, General Mills, Kraft, and Bottom Line. That's just 7 companies. Walk into your average grocery store today and without a doubt you'll see their labels on most products. Might be others, but odds are they've been bought out by at least one of these 7.

Some prime examples of Capitalism gone rampant include the bottled water industry or the meats industry. Fossil fuels too. Whether it be from poor workers having no choice but to live next to, and work in, factories that heavily pollute the neighborhoods and have given them many life-altering health issues, to companies that are selling products chock full of dangerous chemicals or bacteria, and having you believe they are safe for consumption, esp. over alternatives. (e.g. the belief that bottled water is safer than tap, or the constant meats and greens recalls due to the rancid conditions where meats were produced, which then spread the bacteria to other produce? Or remember the droughts in California, and how Nestle still kept extracting millions of gallons of water, despite everyone else trying to conserve it?) Many companies know about health hazards and try to keep silent as long as possible to make more money.

If none of these examples illustrate just how damnable and "fully exploitive" Capitalism has gotten in our country, I highly recommend you watch documentaries such as "Tapped", and "Food Inc". Really eye-opening to just how dirty these companies are, and it's really hard to praise capitalism as "damn better than anything else produced" after that.

TL;DR The corruption of capitalism in the U.S. is a lot worse and has affected a lot more people (if not virtually everyone in the U.S. in one way or another, including the rich folks ontop of it.) than you seem to think.

[Zython]

No, because that's also not what they're doing. If I'm working, I'm paid for the labor I provide. If I'm buying a product, I'm paying for the product. Nothing was stolen from me in either of these cases.

Then where did the CEO who did no labor get his money?

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Well if they exploited people to get rich again it would be the poor exploiting the poor.

What? They were already rich to begin with.

Also that graph shows no country where someone is in "extreme" poverty. You can't have extreme poverty in countries where the workers are having precipitous rises in productivity.

You can if said productivity is being taken from them by the owners of capital.

To the last point, I oppose taking the money and giving it to people because it destroys families, ruins people's motivation, from the point of giving it out, and it is morally wrong to take the money to begin with. Some programs are worse offenders than others,

Funny how this is only a problem when taking money from rich people and not poor people?

[Player Twelve]

Then where did the CEO who did no labor get his money?

Doing business, they certainly didn't steal it from the workers.

[Zython]

Doing business, they certainly didn't steal it from the workers.

So he didn't perform any labor to contribute to the productivity, but he gets paid the most. Strange...

[wheresmywoft]

Doing business, they certainly didn't steal it from the workers.

So their business was not to steal from the workers then?

[igualitarist]

Sure, in the sense that there is disagreement about where the inequality is. An economic leftist believes that there is a problem with wealth inequality, while someone on the economic right believes that there is a problem with lack of opportunity. The whole concept of the "trickle-down effect" is based on the idea that opportunity is at its most available when people (as a whole) are at their most able to employ one another, which implies a certain level of wealth inequality as necessary.

I suspect a lot of people on the economic left believe that the other side has no interest in helping the poor. But a recognition that the poverty problem is more rooted in circumstances than it is in net wealth (and therefore that the best solutions should be aimed at changing people's circumstances, rather than in brute force redistribution of cash) is not the same thing as not being interested.

The OP makes claims about "ending" extreme poverty that seem pretty wild to me. If all the money in the entire world were taken away from people and then redistributed exactly equally, extreme poverty would certainly be ended, for a month or so. But the people who know how money works would rapidly get ahead, and the people who don't would fall behind. And since everyone would have a net worth of a few thousand dollars, nobody would really have enough money to start any really big projects, and the vast bulk of the cash would be in the hands of people who have no idea how to leverage it. The result would be rapid economic decay and large scale poverty with essentially no middle class.

I don't think most leftists think that that's a great idea, but a lot of the time it feels like it's what their argument boils down to.

No wonder why the leftists didn't even bother do quote this post.

They just can't do economics.

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So he didn't perform any labor to contribute to the productivity, but he gets paid the most. Strange...

Someone has to do the strategical job and deal with the risks.

CEO's just don't sit in their comfy chairs, smoking cigars while watching hot girls stripping for them on their rooms.

[Afrospinach]

So he didn't perform any labor to contribute to the productivity, but he gets paid the most. Strange...

Do you have a back yard and a spade? Go start digging. When you get tired come back and tell me how much money you made.