
The World’s 2,153 Billionaires Are Richer Than 4.6B People, Says Oxfam - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-20/2-153-billionaires-are-richer-than-60-of-the-world-says-oxfam
======
ekianjo
Is that very different from let's say 100 years ago? Better or Worse?

> Oxfam said reducing inequality has a bigger effect on lowering extreme
> poverty than economic growth. That analysis “shows that if countries reduced
> income inequality by 1% each year, 100 million fewer people would be living
> in extreme poverty by 2030,”

I thought that extreme poverty has been steadily declining for years according
to several reports (here's one from the world bank:
[https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty](https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty))

~~~
mrpopo
> I thought that extreme poverty has been steadily declining for years
> according to several reports

A couple chosen paragraphs from this opinion piece written during last year's
Davos summit [0] :

> What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation
> where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most
> of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The
> graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on
> was a process of dispossession that bulldozed people into the capitalist
> labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation
> of the global south.

> Moreover, the few gains that have been made have virtually all happened in
> one place: China. It is disingenuous, then, for the likes of Gates and
> Pinker to claim these gains as victories for Washington-consensus
> neoliberalism. Take China out of the equation, and the numbers look even
> worse. Over the four decades since 1981, not only has the number of people
> in poverty gone up, the proportion of people in poverty has remained
> stagnant at about 60%.

[0]
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-
gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal)

~~~
asiachick
Is that really a fair framing?

200 yrs ago I'd guess most people had to do back breaking labor most of the
time just scrape by enough to eat. Hans Rosling has that video that claims
washing machines as one of the best inventions ever because it relieved women
of being forced to watch clothes for 6-8 hours a day. Saying the people didn't
used to need money means almost nothing. Food and shelter were not free. They
required labor.

I think I prefer the current world where I need money to the previous world
where maybe I didn't but my actual lifestyle was horrible.

As for the 1981 quote, what's special about 1981. If we pick 1941? 1881?. I
have no clue about poor countries but my first guess as to why poor places
have stayed poor would not be "because the top 2000 rich people in the world"

~~~
simonh
1981 is when we started collecting reasonably reliable data on global incomes.
Before that we have varyingly credible estimates.

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Ghjklov
As someone who is far away from the average HN user and merely works part-time
in food service while figuring out what to do with his life, I don't think
people like me care that some amount of people are richer or have more wealth
than myself. I care that a good life is becoming increasingly expensive and
unattainable to people who do not have the blessing of having a fancy tech job
or jobs in that tier that require expensive college degrees. As it is, if
nothing changes and I can't figure something out, I'll eventually be priced
out of living where I am in SoCal because rent keeps increasing and wages keep
increasing(it's good but also bad) so it'll only become more difficult to get
these kinds of part-time minimum wage jobs that are often the only option for
people like myself. What is the alternative to all of this for me and people
like me? Go into a backbreaking trade where you trade your health and lifespan
for money you won't actually be able to enjoy using? I feel like, as a person
in his early twenties, the only path to obtaining a greater life with good
work-life balance that doesn't destroy your mind and body is to make it big in
tech or other emerging field. Otherwise, I guess I have to force shutdown and
hope shit reboots.

~~~
rayiner
How much of this feeling is a product of insane cost of living in coastal
cities? The median hoses hold income in Iowa is $60,000 a year, and 72% of
people over 25 don’t have a college degree. The unemployment rate is 2.6%.
(And no, they’re not all tradespeople.) In many places you can get a house for
$125,000 (well under $1,000 a month with taxes, etc.)

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laurieg
When these stories come up I always wonder "What proportion would be ok?" I
don't think anyone is suggesting that everyone in the world has exactly the
same amount of money so the conversation must shift to talk about what level
of inequality is acceptable.

~~~
raihansaputra
I don't think anyone wants 'total equality'. And I think 'how much inequality
is permissible' is a cop out question.

Personally what bothers me is that there exists a substantial group of people
with this much resources while a lot of other people are struggling to even
survive, either daily food or shelter needs, basic healthcare (or the peace of
mind of having health insurance), and other basic needs. I don't think a
majority people would mind how unequal the world is if everyone's basic needs
are available and accessible.

I don't even include a species-wide threat: climate change. How billionaires
can contribute effectively is out of my knowledge and opinion, but it's also a
point of contention with some people.

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newyankee
In developing countries a lot of rich people (mostly politicians e.g. in
India) do not even make it to the official rich lists. I am assuming they have
a complex web of control for their wealth. Shell companies is one example but
i know India has a lot of Benami property which essentially means property
registered to 1 person but actually owned by someone else. DO not ask me about
how it is enforced but an important concept because a lot of wealth is held in
land or real estate holdings.

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marcoperaza
If you took all of their money ($8.7 trillion) and gave it away to the 4.6
billion people, that would be $1891 per person. Now before you get excited,
that's not per year or anything. That is if you took the total accumulated
wealth of all those billionaires and gave it to everyone else. You would never
be able to make such a distribution again, not for a very long time at least,
so it's really peanuts in the long run.

These kinds of statistics are so bogus because they make it sound like
accumulated wealth is what makes the world go around, and that is just simply
untrue. All of this accumulated wealth by the ultra rich, $8.7 trillion held
by billionaires, is NOTHING when you compare it to the world GDP PER YEAR,
which is $80 trillion. Remember, you're comparing the total accumulated
wealth, built up over many years and decades, of the ultra rich with what the
global economy produces in income IN A SINGLE YEAR.

For the majority of people, and especially young people, their most important
asset is not how much wealth they have accumulated but their ability to
produce income year after year through their productivity. And you can't be
pushing government pension and welfare programs on the one hand, which
incentivize spending all of your income instead of saving it, and then touting
stored-wealth as the important statistic.

Through the worldview of this ridiculous methodology, graduates of elite
American universities, with their high paying jobs but substantial student
loans, are among the poorest in the world. Ditto for the highly-paid San
Francisco software engineer who spends most all of his income to live a very
comfortable life in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Better
start transferring wealth to them from the bank accounts of middle class
third-worlders!

~~~
newguy1234
Also isn't most of that $8.7 trillion simply invested in the productive assets
that allow for the creation of that $80 trillion...

~~~
marcoperaza
Yes exactly. People act like this wealth is held in cash accounts in
Switzerland or something (and even if it were, it would be reinvested by those
banks).

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mikekij
Serious question: how much does this differ from what would be expected in a
Poisson distribution? Does this line up with the Pareto Rule?

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
“The pyramid shows that: half of the world's net wealth belongs to the top 1%,
top 10% of adults hold 85%, while the bottom 90% hold the remaining 15% of the
world's total wealth, top 30% of adults hold 97% of the total wealth.”

This seems way off from 20% of the population holding 80% of the wealth.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#Wealth_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#Wealth_distribution_in_2012)

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harryh
Oxfam publishes essentially the same report every year. And it is wrong ever
year. Don't listen to them.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-24/oxfam-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-24/oxfam-
claim-of-soaring-wealth-inequality-relies-on-shaky-analysis)

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dand3lion
The 2,153 billionaires are worth $8.7 trillion, which Oxfam make it difficult
for you to discover. [1]

The world's governments spend $25.9 trillion per year on their populations.
[4]

If you confiscated all of the wealth of all of the world's billionaires,
governments would therefore run out of this money in 123 days.

If you confiscated all of the billionaire wealth and divided it up between the
world's 7.7 billion people, they could receive $1130 each as a one-off gift to
their government. So in a relatively poor country like Kazakhstan, this would
mean government spending per person over 10 years would rise from $20,538 to
$21,669, an increase of only 5.5%. [4][5]

Looking at this another way, Bill Gates retired in 2008 at the age of 53, and
will probably spend at least a total of 20 years finding intelligent ways to
give away "most"[6] of his $108 billion fortune.

If Bill Gates' wealth was given to the world's governments, it would be
completely spent in 36.5 minutes.

Does anyone here think that Bill Gates will do less for the world over 20
years, than governments could do in 36.5 minutes?

[1] Start with their Time To Care report [2], and look at the small print on
page 8 to get the Methodology Note URL [3] (it's there as a graphic instead of
text, making it harder to get to that). The $8.7 trillion figure is never
mentioned in the press releases or in the main report, only in the Methodology
Note.

[2]
[https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...](https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/620928/bp-
time-to-care-inequality-200120-en.pdf)

[3]
[https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...](https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/620928/rr-
time-to-care-methodology-200120-en.pdf?sequence=11&isAllowed=y)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget)

[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan)

[6] [https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-reveals-why-
hes-g...](https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-reveals-why-hes-giving-
away-his-90-billion-fortune-2018-2)

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prostoalex
This is the ultimate result of any taxation system that penalizes income and
encourages property ownership.

~~~
skosch
It's difficult to argue that this isn't at least a big part of the problem.

The mathematically ideal solution may be something close to Partial Common
Ownership[0]: you self-assess what your property is worth, and you get taxed
based on that number. However, that number is public, and if someone wants to
buy your property at that price, you must sell to them. This system encourages
optimal allocation of resources and penalizes hoarding.

[0] See Glen Weyl's fantastic book "Radical Markets". Full chapter here:
[https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s11222.pdf](https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s11222.pdf)

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droithomme
Hm, so if we were to redistribute the assets of group B to group A, then each
member of group A will be _at least_ 2153e9/4.6e9 = $468 wealthier.

~~~
japhyr
$468 would probably make a world of difference to the poorest half of the
global population.

~~~
dzhiurgis
No. It would make $468 new zero. Plus none of the billionaires have any cash.
You can't split their company imaginary market cap.

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ericmcer
How do these numbers work? Like if 1000 people have only $20 saved does that
mean that a single person with 21k saved is richer than the 1000 people?

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fnord77
billionaires are an unelected ruling class.

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el_don_almighty
Congrats... you can do math!

