HN Reader

I would not care at all if 1 ppm of the world population would hold 100 times the wealth of the poorest half of the world population, if all of the poorest half would have nonetheless the means to produce their minimum necessities in energy, food, clothes etc., independently of others, so that their survival for the next months or weeks or even days would not be completely dependent on the benevolence of the rich to create places where they must be employed in order to be able to survive.

A half of century ago, my grandparents were still relatively independent of the rest of the world, because they owned a house and some cultivated land, so even if their normal sources of revenue would have disappeared by becoming jobless, they could have still lived quite decently being sustained only by what they were producing in their garden and by their animals. They also did not depend on external services for things like water supply, garbage disposal or heating. They used electricity, but they had plenty of space so that today one could have used there enough solar panels to be also independent of external energy sources.

On the other hand, now I am living in a big city and I absolutely need a salary if I want to continue to live. Where I live there are no salaries for an engineer or programmer that are big enough so that one could ever buy a place like that owned by my grandparents.

I do not believe that this extreme dependency between employees and employers that has become more and more widespread during the last century will lead to anything good.

There are a lot of important technical problems that must be solved in order to ensure the survival of humanity, but the research to solve them is almost non-existent, because those who control the money are too short-sighted so they invest only according to various fads in research that will produce things of negligible benefit for most humans. The unsolved problems that have accumulated are such that only an effort of the kind that happened in the research done during World War II would solve them, but it seems unlikely that something like that will ever repeat.

Ed Zitron Voice: Is that good?

The main asset most people have is their ability to do useful work for some employer. So for example, if a person has demonstrated a history of steady employment, some bank or finance firm would probably be willing to loan the person the money to buy a car or most of the money to buy a house.

The OP completely ignores this form of wealth.

That is 56,000 people

Assuming a self-similar 80/20 Pareto wealth model (a fractal Lorenz curve), the headline number generalizes as:

    Just x%   | % wealth held | × poorest half
    ---------+---------------+----------------
    20%      | 80%           | 4.00x
    4.0%     | 64%           | 3.20x
    0.80%    | 51%           | 2.56x
    0.16%    | 41%           | 2.05x
    0.032%   | 33%           | 1.64x

FTA: The authoritative World Inequality Report 2026, based on data compiled by 200 researchers, also found that the top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90% combined, while the poorest half captures less than 10% of total global earnings.

The report puts the threshold for being in the top 10% of income earners at €65.5K. I suspect many HN users would fall into this category.

Related: is there a way to estimate what the wealth inequality was like pre-industrial revolution? It occured to me that in an era of kings, queens, aristocrats, and nobles it might be similar to what we see today. Without concluding whether it is right or wrong, would it have been very different for the bottom 90% in terms of inequality? Is it just the ‘who’ that makes up the very top of the wealth and income charts that is different?

> a report that argues global inequality has reached such extremes that urgent action has become essential.

This is always stated like if that was an obvious fact that somehow "action is needed" against the richest, but is it?

Does it matter that a few individuals are multi-billionaires (usually because of the notional value of shares they own)? I would say that it does not. What matters is how the majority and the poorest are faring, which is orthogonal.

Rich people having too much wealth is not necessarily that bad a thing because most of the investment is in productive companies.

It’s not like they are using their wealth on frivolous consumption. Which means redistribution would only change who controls the investment and not the actual consumption patterns of people. Implication is that poor people will consume the same as before after redistribution with perhaps some extra assets.

So nothing materially changes other than some security. Poor people will continue to consume the same as before. Bigger problem is it’s not so clear that redistribution is necessarily a good thing because I feel the people who made money are more likely to make better decisions on their own companies.

I don’t know how companies would fare if for example Amazon were redistributed and run like some public company.

(Posting again)

I did some quick math: the top .001% consumes as much as bottom 3% of Americans cumulatively. It’s high but it gives an accurate picture of how bad the real problem is.

remember, if you have at least $1 in net worth, you individually hold more wealth than the bottom 10% of the US combined!

it's a meaningless statistic.

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/thirteen-million-u...

I think also we cannot measure wealth in GDP or even by salary. Someone who earns $2k e.g. in vietnam and lives in Danang will have better quality of life than someone who earns $4k and lives in SF.

This is misleading. It counts debt as negative. This means a person who has zero wealth and zero debt will have more wealth than bottom 5% of people cumulatively (their wealth cancels out due to debt).

It would be misleading to suggest that a single person with zero wealth has more wealth than 100k people’s wealth combined. But that’s what this headline and report are doing.

I think it's become popular to talk about the issue of accumulation of wealth, and make this kind of dramatic wealth comparison to point out how uneven the distribution is. I wish wealth wasn't treated so abstractly as if it's some kind of universal measure of evil. I would like to learn about some specific cases of hyper wealthy people and what they are actually up to. Seems like some very rich people do really useful things with their money. Couple other thoughts that hang around my head:

- Though the bottom half of humanity may be poor, on average they have a quality of life that has risen dramatically over the past century thanks in large part to the deployment of technologies and aid originating from the wealthier nations.

- Historically the only time the trend of wealth accumulation reverses is during massive crises, wars, and civilizational collapse which make life worse for everyone and nobody with any sense would wish for.

- It seems to me a lot of people channel their unhappiness into resentment of the wealthy, based on this same flavor of folk economics as old as time "the rich get richer". And that unhappiness is usually uncoupled from their position in the economic ladder.

1. My first objection is the outsized ability of the wealthy to interfere with the lives of others. No known political system effectively eliminates the connection between wealth and political power/societal influence.

2. Secondly, there is a point beyond which concentrated wealth is immoral if there are large portions of humanity living without the necessities of life (as defined by society in the current era). While I struggle where the line of morality should be drawn, I say with extreme confidence the wealth of multi-billionaires is clearly far, far on the other side of that line.

3. Lastly, extreme wealth disparity is immoral in the absence of a system that ensures everyone contributes an equal personal burden (impact upon his/her life) in the cost of government/public societal benefits. That is not the case today in the United States (or anyplace else I know of).

The usual first-world disapproval over wealth disparity... often oblivious to the fact that you, the reader, were the global 1% all along

So are citizens of rich countries willing to send their wealth to poor countries? We need global wealth redistribution to fix this right?

I think a very problematic aspect of this is self-perception.

People that see (growing) wealth inequality as a problem rarely perceive themselves as part of it, but e.g. anyone complaining about the "top 1%" on this forum is pretty likely to be part of the "problem" themselves, globally speaking.

I think that for a lot of issues "people richer than us" are mostly a convenient scapegoat to shift the blame upstream, e.g. with CO2 emissions: If you're an average "western" citizen, then you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability, and pointing at celebrities and their private jets or somesuch is no better than thinly veiled whataboutism in my view.

Focusing on reducing economic inequality is silly. Some people being wealth doesn't mean other people must be poor.

Society has never been as rich as now, and people are getting out of misery faster and faster.

Drawing attention to the fact that some outliers have an insane amount of wealth has been shadowing the real problem: politics is in getting in the way of eradicating poverty.

Many people, mostly fueled by envy, misses that and instead focus on asking for taxing the wealthiest rather than noticing that poor people lives could be vastly improved by reducing taxation on them (rather than increasing the taxation of richer people, which is a silly take on the matter), removing economic barriers created by political forces, etc.

Taxing them will be difficult. There will always be places welcoming them with low taxes if they just spend money.

Most of their wealth is probably in companies operating globally. It seems more easy to tax profits in local markets. And increase competition…

As always, it takes into account only a subset of what constitutes wealth.

The state owns national parks, army equipment, buildings... Also, the state owns an impact on regulated companies, subsidies, etc.

Just the US army receives funding about $1 trillion a year. It must own equipment, weapons, and buildings in a value of many trillions.

Every single citizen has a share in all of what the state owns and controls. The state also partially controls the wealth of billionaires.

So I suppose, that the top 0.001% holds as much value as... the bottom 5%?

The .001% is the new 1%.

The real gods of humanity.

How would you call them differently? The amount of power that wealth gives them over "us" is unfathomable.

We often contemplate history with lofty detachment, thinking how far we have come as humans and societies. Kings and queens seen as ancient fictions. Sure some KPIs like life expectancy/comfort improved thanks to technologies and progress. I don't deny all that, but that's not my point. The extreme majority of humans are still vessels/subjects to an absurd minority of other humans. How can't we see that as a failure?

I figured it would be more honestly

put another way, a rounding error of people, owns everything.

not good.

Cool!

> Data from World Inequality Report also showed top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90%

I mean that's definition of top 10% that top 10% is better than other 90%. Journalists should prove read titles before submitting