Say you’re on a yacht with your principal and they had a few tequilas, and then they’re like, “Oh, come on. Join us.” Ultimately, you have to remember that you are there because they’re paying you. It’s a job. They’re not your friend. Obviously, you need to share compassion and empathy. Sometimes your boss needs you to be a shoulder to cry on.
I worked for a billionaire once, on a ranch doing housekeeping. I didn't do work on their house normally, but reflecting after reading this, and them being "left leaning," they didn't have any idea of humanity. For me, the job was fine, but I can see now that I was just a number at best.
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I have a Saudi client who was renting a property in London, I think it was £100,000 a week. They booked it out for three months. They brought 60 of their staff from Saudi Arabia all the way over to the property. It was a family of three, and they only went for three days.
I’m convinced everyone could have a modest life if people didn’t insist on opulent luxury.
There’s so few of these people (and so many of the rest of us) that the math doesn’t actually work out on that.
Try it, look up an estimate of the wealth held by the gratuitously rich, divide by the relevant population, and then multiply by whatever the average return on that capital would be. It would be a nice raise but not life changing. Counterintuitively, extreme poverty is kind of a separate issue to extreme wealth, at least in the West.
It’s a bit more complicated than just adding up all the money and dividing it by the number of people.
Rich people don’t spend their money, they use it to outbid each other for control of existing assets that the rest of us need and have no choice but to pay them for. Instead of spending that money on things that other people get paid to make (the “trickle down” lie), they use it to extort us for access to things we need to survive.
There is plenty enough in this world to go around. That so many have so little is nothing to do with the amount of arbitrary exchange tokens that exist.
It’s a bit more complicated than just adding up all the money and dividing it by the number of people.
I really don’t think it is. I have a feeling this is futile if we can’t even agree what numbers to use, or whether to use numbers, so I’ll just try and explain what I’m saying a bit. If you still disagree that’s fine, it happens sometimes.
Rich people don’t spend their money, they use it to outbid each other for control of existing assets that the rest of us need and have no choice but to pay them for. Instead of spending that money on things that other people get paid to make (the “trickle down” lie), they use it to extort us for access to things we need to survive.
In financial terms, this is called getting dividends. Billionares do about as well as everyone else, just scaled up. In the short term some do a bit better (whoever owns a big share of Nvidia right now), some do worse (Musk, Trump). The difference is that a few percent return for them is more than an average person could ever spend on themselves, and so obviously they live a completely different life from a guy who just has a mutual fund.
There is plenty enough in this world to go around. That so many have so little is nothing to do with the amount of arbitrary exchange tokens that exist.
That’s true. To be clear, I’m not saying poverty is necessary. I’m saying it’s not because of the super rich (at least in the West). Nor am I saying the super-rich are useful.
You know that money isn’t dug out of the ground, right? There’s no gold standard any more. The number of exchange tokens is irrelevant when you’re being extorted (most obviously on housing costs).
That’s true. To be clear, I’m not saying poverty is necessary. I’m saying it’s not because of the super rich (at least in the West). Nor am I saying the super-rich are useful.
If there is enough to go around, then your money-based maths must be incorrect. You’re contradicting yourself. Which is it?
Like I said, there’s just not as much as you’d think once everyone has to share it.
This is a bit different in the third world, which I suppose I should mention. For a number of depressing reasons, the world’s poorest countries are also often the most corrupt and unequal. Numbers are harder to come by but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Nigerian (for example) elite could solve a lot of the Nigerian poor’s problems, with all that resource revenue. Especially considering an extra dollar a day is huge if you live on 2.
I don’t know what kind of math you’re using, but Half of all the wealth in the world is ABSOLUTELY enough for everyone to live modest but not impoverished lives.
Counterintuitively, extreme poverty is kind of a separate issue to extreme wealth, at least in the West.
It ABSOLUTELY is not. That extreme wealth is the result of extreme exploitation of poor people and societal structures designed specifically to benefit the already rich at the expense of everyone else and of hoarding of resources that are thus kept from everyone else.
I don’t know if you’re aware of it or not, but you’re spreading insidious disinformation that the ultra-rich and their pr teams employ to minimize perception of their wealth and deleterious effect on society as a whole.
Someone elsewhere here wrote it out explicitly, and provided a couple sources, so you don’t have to guess.
Half of all the wealth in the world is ABSOLUTELY enough for everyone to live modest but not impoverished lives.
The global top 1.1% is like the Western top 10%, so a lot of people that you’d think of as ordinary. Doctors and lawyers, middle managers who have saved as much as they can and are near retirement. Actually, I’m guessing people’s retirement funds make up a shocking amount of this, because it’s such a common form of wealth. Most of the world’s people live paycheck-to-paycheck, or a family-centric version thereof, which is what the other big chunk is about. Their contribution is literally just the items they use to live day to day, times billions of heads.
It’s true, if we diverted even a good chunk of that to the world’s poorest we’d have no humanitarian problems at all. Try convincing your average Westerner to give up a noticeable percentage of what they own to Africans, though.
It ABSOLUTELY is not. That extreme wealth is the result of extreme exploitation of poor people and societal structures designed specifically to benefit the already rich at the expense of everyone else and of hoarding of resources that are thus kept from everyone else.
No. I realise we’ve left the realm of facts and moved into a political debate, but it has more to do with some funny math. If exploitation was all it took, there’s a lot of poor assholes that would be rich. That’s all that’s worth the time to say.
For the record, I’m still team eat the rich. You have to actually do boring homework stuff and go to long meetings if you want to sustainably address it, though. Otherwise you’ll be just another leftist organisation that splinters months down the road.
Try convincing your average Westerner to give up a noticeable percentage of what they own to Africans, though.
The difference here is how much of that is you actually need. The people in question have to waste it even though they use loopholes of loopholes to not pay their fair share in tax.
Okay. Honestly I doubt the difference is that noticeable to someone in a slum who just wants some plain rice to stave off hunger. I don’t really see how it connects back to the larger discussion, either. Like I said, we all agree billionaires are bad.
It’s important to note that for this specific situation/question, percentages (i.e. “half of all wealth”) aren’t actually useful. Depending on what the actual flat numbers are, it would still be possible for “half of all wealth” evenly distributed to the entire population of the planet to not be a lot of money per person.
That being said, I looked at your linked article which actually includes the flat numbers which means you can do the math and see what an even distribution of wealth amounts to for each and every person.
That article claims that in 2022, total global wealth was 418.3 trillion. Looking elsewhere for total global population in 2022, I’m finding ~8 billion. Those numbers give us a per person wealth value of ~52K. It’s important to note that this isn’t a yearly salary - it represents the sum total of all assets each person would have. Also important to note that the population number includes children - something like global adult population would likely be more useful but I couldn’t easily find that number.
So 52K is our answer, but interpreting it is I think a very complex question all on it’s own. I have no idea if this amounts to a “modest” living or even what “modest” really means (PCs? Air Conditioning? Year round access to global fruit supplies?). I thought for a long time that if we could evenly distribute wealth that everyone could live a “good” life - but the numbers might literally not shake out for that. I still hope they do. I want them to. But I’ve never seen a clear answer. Also, this isn’t an argument against an even distribution of wealth. I think it’s ethically correct to evenly distribute wealth basically no matter what. I just don’t know if anyone knows what the lives of people would really look like in that scenario.
The top 0.1% in the US have ~20Trillion in wealth. That’s enough for all ~340million Americans to get 58,000. Globally across all ~10Billion people thats enough for everyone to get 2,000. That’s a one time thing, making it an investment isn’t accurate to what it represents in terms of value generated that was not given to the workers.
At the US level 58k would get most people out of student loan debt (29k average)and free from credit card debt(6k average).
At a global level 2,000 would allow the world’s poor to be able to eat a healthy diet(3.54) every day for over 1.5 years or a subsistence diet (0.83) for 6.6 years
Yep, that’s about how I remembered it. It would be great, but I’m sure you can see how this wouldn’t change everything (the third world is a different beast, which I just addressed elsewhere). You could get a lot more if you expanded to the top 10%, but that would obviously be more controversial.
That’s a one time thing, making it an investment isn’t accurate to what it represents in terms of value generated that was not given to the workers.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. If you had 58,000 dollars in wealth you’d pretty much have to convert it to income the same way as anyone: by building a business, or buying into an existing one. At an optimistic 10%, copying the whole market over the last century, ignoring all the volatility, that’s $5,800 a year.
If you gave that all to the very poor in the US, that could change everything for them, to be fair. It’s not like it’s nothing, but sometimes I see people imagining that every problem in our lives would be solved by simple redistribution.
And yeah, it’s stupid cheap to save African lives. Donate whatever you can, everybody, and vote for more foreign aid budget.
What I’m saying about this amount of wealth is that it is because people were not paid the value of their work. They gained 20T over the years because that is what they make from underpaying and overcharging. That unregulated capitalism is the basis that leads to such obscene wealth. Redistribution is not about investment but changing the underlying system. It’s basically 58k of backpay. People would largely use it to get out of debt and improve their lives in some way.
From then on with the system changed people are getting an extra 5,800/y. Enough for significantly more families to avoid food insecurity and get/stay out of debt. Those two things are the biggest helps you can give people to reduce crime, and improve communities. It doesn’t have to be much as multiple UBI studies have shown.
Hey, I like this plan, don’t get me wrong. I’d recommend a specific maximum wealth, above which taxation is at 100%, to avoid cleverness from the people hoarding it, and that you tax it retroactively a year or so before the passing of the legislation, assuming that’s legal to do in the US. Then it’s a simple-ish matter of distributing it, which US civil servants are pretty experienced with. You might want to give an extended period to pay this one-time tax just to make sure it’s all orderly.
You could just give people their backpay, but I’d actually suggest putting it into a basic income, which would be higher than $5,800 and would have to draw from taxes on the more relatably fortunate (maybe the next 0.4%?). That’s the main thing I know of that could actually eliminate poverty.
Its not about dividing their wealth. Its about the material conditions created by serving and propping up their extreme wealth. How many government subsidies do these elites consume? Would we even have a car dependent infrastructure nation wide? The true cost of a society being extremely stratified as ours is compounded and obfuscated.
Well, if it’s impossible to measure there’s not much point arguing about it. The other rhetorical questions I can actually address.
How many government subsidies do these elites consume?
Knowing what government budgets look like, I’m going to guess some, but not a game-changing amount. Most of their money comes from their money.
Would we even have a car dependent infrastructure nation wide?
Probably. Before cars there was a lot of rail barons, so it’s not like they needed that to stay rich. As far as I can tell that sort of urban plan was a stupid idea that had broad currency in the midcentury.
People have literally won that much from lottery tickets.
As far as I can tell billionaires do the same thing in a more complicated way, and then claim it was because of their genius and not chance. Even the ex-Soviet oligarchs had the same probability of going out a window as their late rivals did.
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