

Top 1% Control 39% of World's Wealth - codegeek
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100780163

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lifeguard
If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are
successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it
doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or
even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story
with an unhappy ending.

99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of
people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional
slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that
niggling 1 percent who disagree.

source of quotes: <http://occupywriters.com/works/by-lemony-snicket>

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dylangs1030
Did you read the article? This isn't about Occupy Wall Street at all. It's not
criticizing the 1% and doesn't seem in line with your comment here.

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lifeguard
Do you know what the occupy movement is about at all? I don't think so. It is
not about Wall Street.

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dylangs1030
No, but Wall Street is the biggest success (that I know of) of that movement.

I'm not saying your ideological stance is wrong, I'm saying it doesn't seem
relevant to this article.

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lifeguard
I up voted this reply. Good point.

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marknutter
And yet they only have 24 hours in the day to live their life like everybody
else. I only envy people's wealth up to a point, after which having more money
doesn't really do a whole lot for you because enjoyment of that wealth just
doesn't scale. And if everybody's wealth is increasing worldwide, what good
does it do us to point out that it's increasing faster for some than others?
After all, their wealth is increasing faster because their risking it in the
stock market, which drives the growth of the economy. Doesn't bother me in the
least.

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dylangs1030
The article wasn't deriding wealth in tune with the usual tone of that
headline. But you're right, it shouldn't bother you.

Friends of mine react with disgust that someone can make $200k or much, much
more as a programmer, consultant, startup entrepreneur (particularly in the
last case).

"Who needs all that money? What are you going to _do_ with it all?" These are
typically people who wouldn't _mind_ having that much money either. It doesn't
matter what's _done_ with it all. Successful people drive the economy. It's
the opposite, being miserly with money, that's bad for the economy.

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marknutter
It's hard to see headlines like this and not think it's deriding the wealthy.
It could have been put in a much more innocuous way, like "99% of the world's
population controls 61% of the world's wealth". That just doesn't seem to have
the same punch, though.

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dylangs1030
No, it doesn't, because 99 people in a room controlling 61 pieces of a pie
aren't as influential as 1 man controlling 39 pieces of pie.

He has very real, formidable power. The least influential of the 99 will
dislike that. They all have to share their 61 pieces - in practice, a
significant fraction _have no pieces of pie._

Analogy aside, the way this model of wealth plays out is that the 1% are
typically the only outlier, and the other 99% don't all control the remaining
wealth in the same way - they don't have a disproportionate amount to their
own percentile, or a number larger than themselves.

But disproportionate amounts of money is potentially _good_ \- think of what
billionaires can do if they are so inclined.

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blazespin
This is a red herring. Rather than control of wealth, we should be concerned
with control of consumption. Poor people make lousy capital allocators (they
don't have the right education, they don't have access to industry contacts,
and they don't have a history of successful investing).

We constantly talk about redistributing income, taxing the high income
earners. We have to stop this. We have to start taxing the high consumers, we
need a progressive consumption tax. If someone makes a very high income, but
saves it all rather than buys that flashy (frankly, worthless) car - then they
should be allowed to keep all of that.

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Joeboy
> Poor people make lousy capital allocators

Do they? My intuition would be that giving a thousand people a thousand bucks
each would mostly have better results than giving one person a million bucks.
Occasionally the rich come up with a Gates Foundation or whatever, but there's
an opportunity cost to handing billions of dollars to billg too.

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dtrizzle
I hate headlines like this. Wealth is not finite.

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dylangs1030
The sensationalism surrounding this is really kind of sad. It also drives a
knife through the intellectual aptitudes of my circle of friends. People don't
really understand game theory or sociological models well enough to understand
that this sort of wealth distribution makes sense, when you look at data.

The biggest impediment to this, in my experience, is that people expect
reality to intuitively make sense, and operate according to _their intuitive
ideals of what's correct._ Nature has no reason to do this, and is
often...very unintuitive.

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jbooth
This sort of wealth distribution is almost without precedent in the modern
economy. It happened before in the 1920s and didn't end well.

If you understand "game theory or sociological models well enough to
understand that this sort of wealth distribution makes sense, when you look at
data", can you explain it to me? I was under the impression that it's a
disturbing trend and would love to be comforted.

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dylangs1030
A good jumping point would be the "Matthew Effect" - the sociological theory
of accumulated advantage. This is usually paraphrased as "the rich get richer
and the poor get poorer" in lay parlance but it is a legitimate academic
theory in sociology. It illustrates a model of wealth distribution -
particularly wealth disparity, and how it's somewhat inevitable despite
repeated system "tweaks".

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michalu
Oh so it's not World's wealth but worlds private wealth. Why not to
misrepresent it - remaining 99% is a good target market to get some readership
for this trash.

The face value of financial derivatives market if 6 times higher ($791
trillion) than the world's private wealth. Bond market and stockmarket are of
a similar value to private wealth. Who owns majority of those? Governments,
pension funds, insurance firms...

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mzeshle
I think every one should read: <http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html> to
understand the difference between wealth and money.

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skylan_q
So 99% control 61% of the wealth.

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dylangs1030
Excellent motivation to become wealthy, but not necessarily new information.

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rooshdi
How is it motivating? If anything, it highlights the growing disparity of
wealth in the world. Seems like humanity is going backwards.

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dylangs1030
Which side do you want to be on? The side that controls the greatest piece of
the pie or the side that _is_ the pie?

Does that sound too cynical to you? It's just my opinion, but I'm not going to
hold it against mankind that some people have A Lot More Stuff. Wealth is not
a finite resource, it can be had in a variety of different ways for the
creative. Inheritances aside, if getting rich is the side effect to booming
innovation, I'm not too bummed about it. It's business, and the rich have no
compuctions about selling you something to feel better about mankind's slow
devolution into hedonism, so why not get on board with them?

When you become rich, you will have more power, influence and resources to
Save The World. Start there?

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holograham
you can create wealth

