7 ms·

Wealth Inequalities Shown to the Scale

101 points by subrat_rout 6y ago

bjourne 6y ago
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.
- subrat_rout 6y ago
  You can press -> key of <- ->to scroll to right.
  - ash1794 6y ago
    I just viewed the source to read the whole content.
titzer 6y ago
If you made $7000/hr since the birth of Jesus, you'd still have less money than Jeff Bezos.
fallingfrog 6y ago
“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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ZguideZ 6y ago
  Capitalism requires workers and consumers. The places those children are have plenty of workers and do not generally produce consumers of any volume. Capitalism weighs human life only in terms of profit and loss. It is profitable in capitalism for those children to die because they do not require resources, diminish worker capacity etc. Ugly system probably created by and for evil.
andrewfromx 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
troughway 6y ago
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.
jklfu_kunpe 6y ago
The author has no vision whatsoever. His solutions are just take the money from the rich and give it to people. - How about building an extensive and complete rail system that covers the entire country? This would help people get to jobs. - Building out high speed internet throughout the country. Just do that in one swoop everywhere (including rural areas). - Revamp the education system from the ground up. It's all outdated. I could keep going. This kind of stuff could be solved with the budget we already have as a nation, however.
m0llusk 6y ago
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.
djyaz1200 6y ago
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?
- e73u3hdjfu 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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)
oarla 6y ago
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.
ksec 6y ago
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.
- titzer 6y ago
  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.
  - icelancer 6y ago
    >> 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.
    - titzer 6y ago
      Why aren't teachers or scientists billionaires?
longtermd 6y ago
The confusion of wealth and income is big with this one. All of the comparisons, unfortunately, don't make any sense.
- tincholio 6y ago
  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-how-do-you-compare-to-others-2018-09-24 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/whats-your-net-worth-and-h... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
foobar_ 6y ago
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.
- ac29 6y ago
  According to last year's 14A [0], Jeff owns 16% of Amazon. I'm pretty sure there are a long list of people and/or institutions who would gladly pay far more than $100M in cash for that. [0] (see page 41): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312519102995/d667736ddef14a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312519...
  - foobar_ 6y ago
    Yes but the government is sitting on "cash" not stocks and its 100 times more than Bozos.
- dntbnmpls 6y ago
  > 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_ 6y ago
    > But why would anyone convert all their wealth into cash? How would you setup a malaria fund of 10 billion, otherwise ?
hypertexthero 6y ago
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-Capital https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/05/01/Piketty-C... [2]: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/03/pikettys-new-book-explores-how-economic-inequality-is-perpetuated/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/03/pikettys-new-...

101 points by subrat_rout 6y ago

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.

subrat_rout 6y ago
You can press -> key of <- ->to scroll to right.
- ash1794 6y ago
  I just viewed the source to read the whole content.

titzer 6y ago

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

fallingfrog 6y ago

“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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ZguideZ 6y ago
Capitalism requires workers and consumers. The places those children are have plenty of workers and do not generally produce consumers of any volume. Capitalism weighs human life only in terms of profit and loss. It is profitable in capitalism for those children to die because they do not require resources, diminish worker capacity etc. Ugly system probably created by and for evil.

andrewfromx 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.

troughway 6y ago

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.

jklfu_kunpe 6y ago

The author has no vision whatsoever. His solutions are just take the money from the rich and give it to people. - How about building an extensive and complete rail system that covers the entire country? This would help people get to jobs. - Building out high speed internet throughout the country. Just do that in one swoop everywhere (including rural areas). - Revamp the education system from the ground up. It's all outdated. I could keep going. This kind of stuff could be solved with the budget we already have as a nation, however.

m0llusk 6y ago

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.

djyaz1200 6y ago

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?

e73u3hdjfu 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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)

oarla 6y ago

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.

ksec 6y ago

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.

titzer 6y ago
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.
- icelancer 6y ago
  >> 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.
  - titzer 6y ago
    Why aren't teachers or scientists billionaires?

longtermd 6y ago

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

tincholio 6y ago
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-how-do-you-compare-to-others-2018-09-24 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/whats-your-net-worth-and-h... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

foobar_ 6y ago

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.

ac29 6y ago
According to last year's 14A [0], Jeff owns 16% of Amazon. I'm pretty sure there are a long list of people and/or institutions who would gladly pay far more than $100M in cash for that. [0] (see page 41): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312519102995/d667736ddef14a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312519...
- foobar_ 6y ago
  Yes but the government is sitting on "cash" not stocks and its 100 times more than Bozos.
dntbnmpls 6y ago
> 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_ 6y ago
  > But why would anyone convert all their wealth into cash? How would you setup a malaria fund of 10 billion, otherwise ?

hypertexthero 6y ago

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-Capital https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/05/01/Piketty-C... [2]: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/03/pikettys-new-book-explores-how-economic-inequality-is-perpetuated/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/03/pikettys-new-...