
Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity - tomazz
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-inequality-idUSKBN150009
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maxerickson
flagged but open discussion from last night:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13407794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13407794)

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mrweasel
It's a little one sided, both in the Reuters piece, and in the media in
general. Most journalist and politicians seems focused on the wealthy, but
forget that the vast majority of people aren't poor because Mark Zuckerberg is
rich.

Sure, the wealthy needs to pay their taxes, just like everyone else, but it's
not going to magically pull 2 billion people out of poverty.

~~~
theRhino
absolutely right - wealth distribution isn't a zero-sum game

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RyanHamilton
I think it may be a zero sum game.

This universe and planet has finite resources. There is only so much
iron/steel to build cars, rare earth metals to build electronics..
Fundamentally that's a zero sum game?

Sure in the recent short term, we've got lucky that population was small
relative to planet size and we got significantly better each year at
extracting resources. Even if we get lucky again and find a way to extract
resources from space and energy from some amazing new tech. At some point that
too levels off, especially as population keeps increasing exponentially, but
energy capture/generation does not. Then we are back to zero sum game.

Historically most tribes/kings etc got rich at the expense of the
workers/slaves they exploited. Wealth distribution has and long term mostly
will be zero sum, or so it seems to me?

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dagw
_There is only so much iron /steel to build cars_

Steel doesn't really have an innate value, the value only comes when you've
turned your steel into cars. If someone comes up with really clever way to
make the same car using 30% less steel then we've effectively increased the
total value of a fixes amount of steel and thus we are no longer looking at a
zero-sum game.

Sure in a large enough time scale there are only so many atoms in the universe
and you can't fight thermodynamics (we think...), but that kind of argument is
really interesting when looking at a practical level and time frame.

~~~
RyanHamilton
>> when looking at a practical level and time frame.

Consider the current rate of population growth: 2017 7,515,284,153 2010
6,929,725,043 2000 6,126,622,121

Roughly 1.28% growth per year. Unless you are able to make a car using 30%
less steel EVERY 21 years you are in trouble within "a practical time frame".
Oh and you also need to reduce the emissions by 30% every 21 years per person
just to maintain current pollution levels.

Exponential growth is a beautiful thing for income, not so good for
consumption.

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jul/07/research.waste](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jul/07/research.waste)

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pdog
_> The eight individuals named in the report are [Microsoft's Bill] Gates,
Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, veteran investor Warren Buffett, Mexico's
Carlos Slim, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's
Larry Ellison and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg._

With the exception of Ortega, Buffett and Slim, that's a lot of wealth
concentrated in tech. Hmm...

~~~
Roritharr
Yeah, i find it always funny when so called futurists say:"The AI Revolution
will lead to a few Tech-Barons owning everything without any possible recourse
for the rest of society." To which the obvious reply is: "I thought they had
already won that battle?

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karol
The real issue is here is how much assets _with finite supply and cruicial to
human existence_ (e.g. food and water supply, real estate, cruicial
technology) can be brought under control of few individuals with such wealth.
For example if someone buys the majority of land, there will not be an easy
way out even if the monetary wealth distribution will change.

I am wondering why isn't it more often discussed that wealth yields assets
that yields even more wealth, because this is how capitalism is set up. This
means that the situation cannot be easily improved because wealthy individuals
have supeior knowledge and assets to enrich themselves further.

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EGreg
You hit the nail on the head.

I don't care how rich the rich are as long as our systems are set up to
_guarantee_ a minimum level of access to basic resources including housing,
drinkable water, food, internet access, safety, healthcare and education.

As long as these minimums are guaranteed with a large buffer (and every
century the minimums go up) I am fine with the wealthy having a lot of money.
In our system, the banks invest that money anyway, when the rich aren't using
it. These investments represent belief about future demand -- which may result
more and more in a plutocracy. But as long as the rest of humanity lives
comfortably, I don't care.

Safety nets produce real choice. They allow you to spend time raising your
kids and educating them. The kids can join the new knowledge-based workforce.
You can as well, since you can take time off to learn. We can maybe travel to
the stars.

But without the basic guarantees (vouchers, single payer based) many people
are stuck in dead end jobs or worse, grinding poverty. It's like a poker
tournament where most people have a really small stack AND can't afford to fly
out of the tournament. So much wasted opportunity for human knowledge.

The other thing is smashing the knowledge silos - patents on drugs etc. The
way science and open source grew is that anyone could stand on the shoulders
of giants and their contributons added to the growing body of knowledge.
That's how you serve the long tail eg cure malaria the same way wikipedia has
articles on obscure topics and linux runs on toasters. Public platforms
outperform private ones.

To sum up: tax the robots, guarantee the basic safety net, put education
online and use colleges for tutoring and certification only, promote
patentleft for drugs and open source for software.

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OskarS
This is an incredibly misleading statistic because they use NET wealth, which
means that they subtract your debt from your wealth. That means that if you
have more debt than wealth (not necessarily a bad thing), you have _negative_
wealth. This is the case for roughly 40% of the world's population.

This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average
groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than the poorest 2.85 billion
people in the world. It's also the same metric Donald Trump used in that story
his daughter liked to tell, about him walking past a homeless person and
saying "that guy is 700 million dollars richer than me".

Income and wealth inequality is a huge problem, but stats like these are
incredibly misleading and shouldn't be used to make the argument.

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aluhut
> This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average
> groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than the poorest 2.85 billion
> people in the world.

But isn't that true? If you are not born into a family that will give you a
huge dept and a second mortgage on the house, you are better of.

~~~
tjansen
No, not necessarily. Cash flow matters more than debt. Spending all the money
that you earn and keeping your net worth at 0 is actually a great way to live
(at least until you retire). Being born into a family with huge debt is likely
giving you above average income potential. I'd rather be worrying about being
born into the family with just a little debt, but struggling to pay it off.

~~~
aluhut
> Being born into a family with huge debt is likely giving you above average
> income potential.

I don't understand that. A family with a huge dept is a badly managed family.
How can there be anything good coming from that?

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tjansen
In order to get huge debt you need to be able to demonstrate a high income
potential, high enough to convince the creditor to lend you that kind of
money. If you have huge debt, it's likely you can pay it off sooner or later.
Also, you won't get it as an uneducated working class family. The background
of a huge debt family usually results in an above-average income for the
offspring.

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aluhut
I don't really need to demonstrate anything with credit cards looking to the
US for example. Thinking of those nasty dept packages that got so prominent
2008.

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ckastner
For the curious:

 _The eight individuals named in the report are Gates, Inditex founder Amancio
Ortega, veteran investor Warren Buffett, Mexico 's Carlos Slim, Amazon boss
Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison and former New
York City mayor Michael Bloomberg._

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topbanana
Isn't it more important to look at how the absolute wealth of the poorest,
than the relative wealth?

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bprieto
It is if you care about the poorest.

It isn't if you care about your message and narrative.

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treuherz
Oxfam released a similar stat last year, and the BBC's More or Less team
didn't think much of it. The wealth numbers they're using aren't necessarily
well-behaved when they're totted up the way Oxfam has done, as there are a lot
of cases where wealth as-measured isn't an intuitive measure of "richness".
For example, a new graduate with tens of thousands in loan debt will still
have a chance at better long-term income than someone with neither the
qualification nor the loan who has higher numeric worth.

That said, it's harder to find examples where the a high wealth implies a low
buying power, so this doesn't necessarily contradict the crux of the piece.
Either way, it's worth being skeptical of misapplied statistics.

Sources:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26613682](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26613682)
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03fj84x](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03fj84x)

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cromwellian
These measures I don't think are a good way to measure, because I think
there's a difference between someone who's very wealthy on paper because of
high stock prices, and someone whose's wealth because they got a
disproportionate share of income. The latter represents money diverted in the
here and now to someone else, and the former represents money that can be
diverted in the future. Of course, you can ask Elizabeth Holmes how much of a
billionaire she is now with Theranos, as an example of how paper wealth
doesn't always translate.

It's possible for someone to be very IPO stock rich, but not actually have
received much income. This is especially true for founders who started with
their stock, instead of being given it as a bonus.

~~~
tajen
Agreed. It's still an indicator, although it shouldn't be taken alone. The
yearly energy consumption of a person is another that is often recognized as
relevant, especially since the duration of our species is now determined by
our glasshouse gas emissions.

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EGreg
This is better explained by the amount of impoverished people in the world.

I thought poverty was down! I would rather fight inequality by eliminating
poverty. Tax the robots and redistribute wealth to social safety nets!

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snarfy
What if those 8 people spent all of their wealth buying goods and services
from those poor people?

To spend all of that wealth, every fish would have to be caught, every forest
mowed down, every drop of oil burned, to have enough natural resources to
spend all of that money.

I'm sure I'm wrong and others will correct me, but I still can't help but feel
it's in some ways good that the wealth is so concentrated it can never be
fully spent.

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maxerickson
Consumption of resources is measured in trillions of dollars per _year_.

These incredibly wealthy people have captured a very small slice of overall
human productivity.

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collin_u_out
It's amazing how little they actually have to spend to make people think they
are philanthropic, and not just greedy assholes.

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imglorp
I was surprised to see Zuck and Larry on the Giving Pledge list, not that they
gave, to your point, but at least they've promised to.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge)

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collin_u_out
Throw your name on a list, throw a couple bucks you'll never miss at someone,
and have a couple pressers. The wealth inequality gap is enormous, and we
celebrate the people doing it.

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theRhino
note that half of that lot have given pretty much all their wealth to charity.
There is an argument that their ability to deploy that wealth to good effect
is far greater than that of the american govt? In away - its a very positive
message

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sgift
The alternative would have been to tax them more and use the tax results to
help people. Let's compare:

Taxes:

    
    
      - Predictable income
      - Democratic control over the spending
      - Big risk of misuse due to lobbying
    

Charity:

    
    
      - No predictability, depends on the whim of those who could spend
      - No democratic control
      - Small risk of misuse due to lobbying
    

I welcome everyone to add to both lists. From my comment history it should be
pretty clear that I'm not a fan of hoping that those with money are in a
charitable mood, but I know there's a strong faction with an opposing view of
the world, which could help balancing such a list.

~~~
LyndsySimon
\- Taxes are largely avoidable by those with sufficient wealth.

\- Taxes reduce economic development by those who control capital.

\- Taxes reduce charitable giving, especially by those in the upper middle
class.

\- Charity doesn't require the implication of violence for noncompliance.

\- Charity encourages more direct management and oversight by those who give.

I would also argue that "No democratic control" is not true for charity, but
rather that control is biased in favor of those who control capital.

> I welcome everyone to add to both lists. From my comment history it should
> be pretty clear that I'm not a fan of hoping that those with money are in a
> charitable mood, but I know there's a strong faction with an opposing view
> of the world, which could help balancing such a list.

Note that my suggestions are not accusatory, but in the spirit of this
statement.

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nepotism2016
Greed is good, baby...I mean poor people

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easytiger
This stuff gets eaten up in the UK by people like its crack cocaine and oxfam
have an agenda to push to tunnel more funding their way.

