
World's Top 26 Billionaires Now Own as Much as the Poorest 3.8B - kushti
http://time.com/5508393/global-wealth-inequality-widens-oxfam/
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dagw
More discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18958478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18958478)

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defertoreptar
What I'd like to see more in these articles is an acknowledgement of how power
laws work (or perhaps log-normal distributions or stretched exponential
distributions
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.0212](https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.0212)).

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Droobfest
Is this one of those things where the vast majority of the 3.8B has a zero or
negative net worth?

I'm not trying to deny anything about wealth inequality, but I wonder what
this clickbaity statement really says about anything.

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coldtea
> _Is this one of those things where the vast majority of the 3.8B has a zero
> or negative net worth?_

How does that make it better? If anything, it makes it worse...

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zulln
That would me that you alone has more money than the poorest 3.8B people,
making it somewhat clickbaity to bring up the billionaires?

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ceejayoz
It says the top 26 billionaires own _as much as_ the poorest 3.8B, not that
they own more.

Unless you're worth more than the top 26 billionaires combined, you don't have
the net worth to match 3.8B people.

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setr
Sure, but if 2B of that population is in the negative, then even at minimum
wage I do have the net worth to match 2B; its just the next 1.8B where
comparison even starts to make sense.

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nabla9
I don't think Forbes Billionaires List is not accurate enough to track wealth
changes from year to year as Oxfam does. It can show some trends over several
years at best.

[https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...](https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/620599/tb-
public-good-or-private-wealth-methodology-note-210119-en.pdf)

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gtt
I think this happens because of technological development creating and
enhancing positive feedback loops due to specialization and economy of scale.
Can we have similar levels of technological development without such super
concentration of wealth?

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cazum
Technology doesn't even need to factor into it.

Wealth creates wealth, regardless of the available gadgets. We are now at a
stage where the wealthy have used their wealth to accumulate more and more
wealth. And as we speak, they are using that wealth to get more and more and
more.

That's the feedback loop.

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agumonkey
The most important thing for non wealthy is organization. Sharing issues and
knowledge. Instead of relying on the rich to give them solutions (no
incentives to do so..)

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ianai
That being one of the hopes, decades back, for the internet.

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agumonkey
Unfortunately most of the web has become a business rarely aligned with human
needs or happiness.

Still a bit of the tech can be used but it's not enough per se.

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ianai
I wonder if something could be worked out with a truly decentralized, mesh
network based on personal equipment.

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agumonkey
some neighborhoods in the US have tried local internet providers, worth
looking into

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commandlinefan
I guess I’m too cynical to believe that any attempt to go after those 26
people will land on them rather than on me - I’m comparatively well off but
much less able to defend myself than a Donald Trump or a Bill Gates.

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redwood
70% tax rate above $10M makes a lot of sense.

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cazum
The marginal tax rate might help the American poor, but for the rest of the
world, where the majority of poor people are, this, on its own, isn't really
going to do much good.

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redwood
It lowers the incentive to develop such wildly unequal compensation packages

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ipnon
Some may find this reprehensible, some may not (about 26 people at last
count). Regardless, this represents a gargantuan opportunity for startups.

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Scarblac
What, creating things the 26 may want to spend on? Or trying to squeeze out
some profit from 3.8 billion poor?

