
Wealth Inequalities Shown to the Scale - subrat_rout
https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
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ksec
This is often the problem I see with people mixing up _Wealth_ and _Income_. A
person with $100K income could also have millions of _wealth_ or asset from
stocks to property. Jeff Bezos has most of this wealth from Stocks. And I am
willing to bet $100 given the current market cap and PE or PEG, his
resignation from the company and liquidations of his Amazon Asset will trigger
a sell off that its value differs quite a lot to his current value.

Someone might as well set up a gaming site called How to Become A Billionaire.
Simply paid the cheapest amount of money to set a a company somewhere, issues
a billion shares and get someone to buy one share for a dollar.

While I do agree on the world in large has inequality problem. Focusing on the
ultra rich doesn't fix it.

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titzer
You gotta wonder about the morality of a society that allows a person to amass
40,000 lifetimes of wealth and lets others starve. The ultra rich are a
mathematical anomaly that exposes what a sham this "meritocracy" is. It is
physically impossible to create $140 billion dollars of actual value for
people in a single human lifetime (2.5 billion seconds). The only way is the
amplification and exponentiation of that work through millions of other
people, and to make the incremental cost of adding that value essentially
zero. Which means that the market has absolutely failed to price the "goods"
created by these people according to their incremental cost.

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icelancer
>> physically impossible to create $140 billion dollars of actual value for
people in a single human lifetime

Source? I think Linus Torvalds and Norman Borlaug both easily did this. Jeff
Bezos and Bill Gates certainly might be up there. $140 billion is not that
much when you compare the productivity gains just these four people have given
the world.

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dntbnmpls
> Source?

The reality of physics and human capability?

> I think Linus Torvalds and Norman Borlaug both easily did this.

They had a part in it, but it's the people/ecosystem that creates the wealth,
not an individual. Linus didn't create all the distros. He didn't install it
on all the servers around the world.

> Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates certainly might be up there.

They themselves didn't create $140 billion of anything. It took the efforts of
hundreds of thousands/millions of people, along with highly favorable laws and
the society in which they lived in. Also, Bezos and Gates destroyed a lot of
businesses as well with their monopolistic practices. As a matter of fact,
when it comes to gates/microsoft, I'd say it's an overall net negative as
microsoft set back computing/computer literacy more than anything.

I thought the fallacy/myth of the "great man" nonsense died with Jobs. There
were plenty of people who thought Apple was over when Jobs died. But I guess
it's alive and well today.

What's the right wealth level for people? I don't know. Personally, I think
the best way combat wealth inequality is to create laws to foster competition
so that one company doesn't become a monopoly. But instead, we are in an era
of mergers, monopolies and consolidation. So wealth inequality will inevitably
continue to grow.

~~~
icelancer
>> They had a part in it, but it's the people/ecosystem that creates the
wealth, not an individual. Linus didn't create all the distros. He didn't
install it on all the servers around the world.

One is a much more replaceable skill than the other in this equation. That's
why Torvalds has contributed more to world productivity than most.

~~~
dntbnmpls
> One is a much more replaceable skill than the other in this equation. That's
> why Torvalds has contributed more to world productivity than most.

What is? It takes as plenty of skill to build a distro ( along with the
package management systems, etc ) as it does to write a kernel. I understand
that to most people, "kernel" = magic, but it really isn't. Not to mention
many people helped develop the linux kernel.

Linus deserves credit, but so does red hat, slackware, debian, etc. Without
those distros and GNU project, nobody would know of linus or the linux kernel.
And the vast majority most of the GNU/Linux OS ecosystem is non-linux.

> That's why Torvalds has contributed more to world productivity than most.

The "great man" nonsense really has staying power. Using your logic, Torvalds'
mother has contributed even more than torvalds to world productivity because
she created linus...

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oarla
Couple of issues I have when I see such graphs or scale of inequality. I'm
referring to those wealthy people who want to use their good fortune for
benefit of society, not all of them.

1\. Usually these comparisons imply that the super rich have a major chunk of
their wealth sitting as cold hard cash. That's hardly the case. Most of the
wealth is in assets or illiquid forms. Take Bezos for ex, a good chunk of his
wealth is in AMZN stock. If he sells all of it to fund a philanthropic scheme,
that'd trigger a massive selloff in the stock market and impact a lot of
people negatively. Not saying that they're helpless, but I think they may be
doing some good with all the excess cash that we may not be aware of.

2\. From a logistics point of view, it's hard to ensure that money intended to
help someone reaches them. Unless you are personally delivering the money,
there'll be middle men who take their cut. If a billionaire decides to spend a
billion dollars on charity, I'd think a bunch of orgs would want that money,
to do charity as well as run their non-profit operation. Which would make it
appear that not enough is being done by the billionaire, when it is employing
a few and benefiting some more.

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andrewfromx
Feels like the author keeps making this point over and over that if we could
just take x million from these people we could fix so many things. But I don’t
see any vision painted for this new world where now everything is OK and fair.
Maybe the current system we got is what makes people build things like amazon.
Maybe jeff gets to be proud of his wealth and makes his own philanthropy
choices.

~~~
otde
What’s mind-boggling is that Bezos is _still a billionaire_ after all of the
suggested changes. The amount this affects his day-to-day life is slim to
none. He’d still get to be proud of his wealth in the new system!

I have a hard time feeling like large-scale preventable deaths of six figures
of real human children is worth Jeff Bezos’ warm tummy fuzzies he gets when he
thinks about being unfathomably rich. Instead of thinking about whether
innovations like Amazon would have materialized in this brave new world where
people can actually get their malaria treated and have access to clean
drinking water, consider: how many people might have made something just as
game-changing as Amazon, but died a preventable death, or lived on, but
weren’t given the same resources to survive and thrive as someone like Bezos?

~~~
andrewfromx
i think what you are missing is it's a game of "whack a mole" way more than a
game of a perfect puzzle where if you just do the ethical thing, and just be
nice, and cure this and stop that, THEN, THEN everything will be... ok. But
the reality is you plow 2 billion dollars into fixing one thing and this
displaces something else and you can't get to this desert mirage utopia
society we think we see just down the road if we could just get people like
Jeff to fork it over.

~~~
titzer
I fundamentally reject the idea that society is obligated to help Jeff Bezos
protect his $100 billion dollar fortune.

I think it is absolutely fair to say that society will not allow you to have
more than $1 billion. Flat. Out. Wealth. Cap.

Then maybe instead of corporations squeezing their customers for every nickel
and dime and screwing pensioners they can retire to their private islands and
enjoy their life.

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m0llusk
Looking at the scale is kind of interesting, but what we really need is more
information about options for making things more equal in terms of their
relative effectiveness and trade offs. America used to have 90% income tax on
the richest. At some level that kind of worked, but it also led to a shell
game where executives drove company cars to company condos and so on. Agreeing
on reasonable taxation and enforcement could go a long way but we keep on
minimizing land value taxation and other such alternatives.

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titzer
If you made $7000/hr since the birth of Jesus, you'd still have less money
than Jeff Bezos.

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bjourne
I wonder if side-scrolling was chosen intentionally. Side-scrolling is so much
more annoying because you cant press space or page down to scroll faster.

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subrat_rout
You can press -> key of <\- ->to scroll to right.

~~~
ash1794
I just viewed the source to read the whole content.

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hypertexthero
A general strike [is needed][1] around the world demanding a basic income of
between $1000 to $2000 a month for all human beings, and a one-time payment of
around $100,000 to each person when they reach 25 years of age, financed by a
[progressive tax][2] on the wealthiest people in the planet.

[1]:
[https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/05/01/Piketty-C...](https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/05/01/Piketty-
Capital)

[2]: [https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/03/pikettys-
new-...](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/03/pikettys-new-book-
explores-how-economic-inequality-is-perpetuated/)

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djyaz1200
It's in the interest of the super-rich to advocate for a strong social safety
net to prevent millions of hungry people with nothing to lose from taking what
they need instead of waiting for it to be shared. ...at least until they can
build a colony on Mars or something?

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e73u3hdjfu
It's not clear to me why this is actually true. Food is cheap if you don't
waste a bunch of time on anti-science regulations like the EU. California and
New York aren't short on space, building is simply heavily regulated with
anti-poor laws masquerading as environmentalism because people would rather
protect their swamps and property values than see a construction boom. Water
isn't scarce, if it was you wouldn't have booming agricultural industries in
drought prone regions. And electricity is only expensive because people would
rather tear down oil, nat gas, and nuclear now rather than after green energy
has become not terrible. The idea that society isn't thriving because the
billionaire class has most of the wealth ignores that in many developed
countries the cost of living could be much lower if not for the regulatory
environment. People have simply been convinced that there are more important
issues than helping the poor.

~~~
triceratops
Darned regulatory environment, inflicting clean air, water, and food upon the
poor! How dare they!

(I agree with you about the property value stuff tho)

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longtermd
The confusion of wealth and income is big with this one. All of the
comparisons, unfortunately, don't make any sense.

~~~
tincholio
In this case it's pretty much a rounding error. Median net worth for college-
educated people in the US is < 300K [0] (and it drops fast for all other
cases), so it's not far off from the annual income. You could plug the actual
educational attainment distribution [1] and get finer numbers, but it won't
change much for the purposes of this comparison.

[0] [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/whats-your-net-worth-
and-h...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/whats-your-net-worth-and-how-do-
you-compare-to-others-2018-09-24) [1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States)

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troughway
It's quite clear that billionaires don't care about this. They will part ways
with their money in a way they see fit. If it means donations to non-profits
they own, or off-shore companies to lessen the amount of taxes they have to
pay, then they will do just that.

All this talk about inequality is for naught. You don't have to tell Bezos how
big his slice of the pie is. He knows. And he will take more by any means
necessary.

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fallingfrog
“Around 800 children will die of malaria today. A small group of super rich
people could stop it for a sum of money so small that they would likely never
even notice its absence. But they choose not to.”

Brutal.

The theoretical appeal of capitalism is that it allocates resources
efficiently, is it not? Can someone explain to me how letting all these
children die of malaria is efficient, given the cost/benefit of eliminating
it? Is our economic system really allocating those resources in the best way?

Edit: come on guys if you’re going to downvote me then try to think of a
reason I’m wrong..

~~~
fallingfrog
I think the reason that capitalism does not allocate money to save children’s
lives is that the investor cannot claim any of the child’s future income.
That’s also the reason that capitalism tends to under invest in things like
education and nutrition for kids, or environmental protections or fighting
climate change- how are you going to recoup that investment?

There is one way. If everyone were slaves, then the capitalist really would
own every child they saved. You’d probably see rates of malnutrition and
disease plummet. Of course, then we’d all be slaves. But that would be a
purer, less dysfunctional capitalism. Maybe that’s the only direction
capitalism can go- it might go that way through a maze of debts and complex
contracts and property rights rather than legal ownership of persons, but
that’s probably the direction capitalism is going to go, if you assume that
capitalism is evolving to be the most economically efficient version of
itself.

~~~
ZguideZ
Let's not delude ourselves, workers are already slaves under capitalism. How
many times have you heard someone say they were working until they could buy
their freedom? That's what saving for retirement is, after all - and most end
up failing and having to work in some capacity until they are either unable or
dead. Wage slavery is slavery.

~~~
fallingfrog
It is slavery in the sense that you are slaving your will to another for most
of your good waking hours in order to not starve. But I do try to be careful
about what I call slavery because that conjures up the gruesome image of
hotboxes and whippings, which still do exist in parts of the world, but a wage
earning software developer in the USA is in a materially better position than
that. I guess I would just say there are gradations of oppression and I want
to not give the impression that I’m papering that over by calling it all the
same word. Solidarity.

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foobar_
I think this is a false equivalency. How much of the wealth is convertible to
cash ? I think its 1% at best ... so bezos is worth 100 million.

Every years budget for U.S is in trillions, so its pointless to go after
wealth of private people.

Even if we were to take the wealth of the richest, do you expect the
government to spend it, with all the bureaucracy ? Even if you hand wave all
the cash ... malaria and hygiene are not going to fix themselves without feet
on the ground.

~~~
dntbnmpls
> I think this is a false equivalency. How much of the wealth is convertible
> to cash ?

All of it? But why would anyone convert all their wealth into cash?

> I think its 1% at best ... so bezos is worth 100 million.

What? Even if he dumped all his shares on the market, he'd net a lot more than
$100 million. Sure dumping the stock would push down the share price and he
wouldn't net less than $100 billion, but why would he do that? Even if he did,
he'd easily net tens of billions as there is ample support from $2300 to
whatever level the price eventually drops to.

~~~
foobar_
> But why would anyone convert all their wealth into cash?

How would you setup a malaria fund of 10 billion, otherwise ?

~~~
Someone
You give it 10 billion worth of ‘stuff’ (or promise to do so over a number of
years)

A charity fund of that size will invest its money, anyways, until it has found
a way to spend it (well) on its cause, so you can just as well give it bonds,
buildings, or shares.

