
Eight men own same as poorest half of world: Oxfam - joeyespo
https://www.yahoo.com/news/eight-men-own-half-worlds-wealth-oxfam-001214017.html
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camikazeg
I hear these kinds of statistics all the time and they are appalling, but I
need to understand how they are measured in order to think about the best ways
to fix the problem.

There are a lot of people in the US that have plenty of income, but little to
no wealth. In other words, their expenses match up with their income. They
rent a nice house, have a large loan on their car, some credit card debt, etc.
There are a lot of reasonably well off people that have a negative net worth.
Would anyone living paycheck to paycheck be considered as having zero wealth?
That's half of America [0]. With only 20K in my 401k, I have more wealth than
half of the country by that metric.

Also, since we don't have a wealth tax, nobody has to report their personal
assets, so how are these numbers calculated?

On the flip side, if you try to measure inequality of income, instead of
wealth, some of the wealthiest people on earth can have years of enormous
losses that hardly affect their quality of life but would put them on the
bottom of the income scale.

[0][http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-
secre...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-
shame/476415/)

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dukeluke
Globalization means there's a race to the bottom to see what country can make
things the cheapest. It means labor laws and expecting good treatment of
employees makes a country uncompetitive, and makes local income equality
nearly impossible.

Granted, it is also the world's most powerful method of wealth creation, but
that doesn't mean much when the people without capital don't see the rewards.

To those who disagree with me( because I'm sure there will be many), why am I
wrong?

~~~
cylinder
I just watched a documentary on the shipbreaking "industry" in Bangladesh:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhIaEEW63Sc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhIaEEW63Sc)

It's horrifying, but I don't know that I can come up with a remedy. Clearly,
these men don't have other job options, and with no job, they'll just starve.
And if they don't take the job, they're easily replaced with another human who
will. Zero turnover expense for the employer.

The profits are not really "trickling down." Five families control this
industry, and they make enormous profits ($5 million per ship, which is a 100%
return). The government is easily captured / bribed to prevent much pressure
about working conditions. There's no tradition of a labor movement from which
these people can draw from, they're uneducated and really when you're that
poor you're only able to think about today, much less where your rights are in
a few years.

And let's say Bangladesh did somehow make it too expensive / burdensome to
shipbreak there. I hear Somalia has no laws, and lots of young men standing
around who will join in.

You try to instead convince Germany to stop sending their ships to Bangladesh
to be broken in these conditions. But now, German shipping becomes a more
expensive business due to the disposal costs, and German shipping companies
become uncompetitive against Chinese shipping companies which will happily
shipbreak in Bangladesh. Germany loses its shipping industry either by
relocation of the firms to a friendly jurisdiction or they just go insolvent
after losing all their business to Chinese competitors.

It really is all a race to the bottom and I don't know of a solution.

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m-p-3
Which makes me think of an article I've read some time ago.

[http://www.futurity.org/inequality-
violence-1343072-2/](http://www.futurity.org/inequality-violence-1343072-2/)

