The richest 1% took home nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together over the past two years.
If that doesn’t convince you wealth inequality is out of control, I don’t know what will.
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@rbreich You have your priorities mixed up... people making more than everyone else, no matter the extent is **not** the issue. It only detracts from the real issue, which is the quality of living of the poorest people below the poverty line.
Wealth is not a pie, a fixed thing with only so much to go around. One person having more does **not** mean someone else has to have less. Wealth is something constantly being created and destroyed, the real question is why arent the poor able to create wealth.
@freemo @rbreich I'll push back on this one, if only because I don't want to look at my dynamic programming assignment 😂
I agree wealth inequality itself isn't the problem; however, I don't think the market is good at assigning value judgements to things, which leads to a whole bunch of really screwed up stuff, and the subsequent conflation of benefiting from capitalism with worshiping mammon.
For example: the CCP has been torturing religious and ethnic minorities for decades, mass surveilling their people, murdering political dissidents, and *MOST IMPORTANTLY TO INVESTORS* preventing individuals or corporations from withdrawing assets from the country "illegally". Yet, our investors, companies, etc. speculate that China is "the next big thing" and lose their asses while enriching a hostile country. People continue investing in Nestle and Tesla despite the provable child labor in their supply chains, (and of course the rest of the atrocities Nestle got away with). Why? Because making an extra 2% ROI is all that matters.
Meanwhile, private equity firms in the US buy up failing companies for pennies on the dollar, try to squeeze *every* *last* *drop* of capital out of them, and cause lasting damage in the process (see the environmental damage caused by rail issues across the US, alongside the mess of our hospitals, many of which are owned by private equity). Their M.O. is to run things so lean, and to cut so many corners, that the business fails anyway, but at least they didn't let any of that money go to the worke- I mean-down the drain.
The impacts of our modern values in relation to money go on and on, because nearly everyone has a price but not a spine: they'll sell out their employees and the business they built up to get rich, and leave the people they employ in the hands of a board who never sees them, and frankly doesn't care about them at all. For most, it's not about loyalty, purpose, effecting change in the world, and eking out a living (even a good one!) in the process; it's solely about the number of 0s on the check. It's so bad to the point that peoples lives and finances are ruined for "shareholder value", while disregarding the people who actually generated value for the company and the economy.
Finally, the reasons that the poor "cannot create wealth" is that often it is taken from them while the wealthy are given kickbacks in an almost perverse way: banks charge more fees for lower account balances, accessing credit with lower APY is more difficult, etc. Of course much of this boils down to financial literacy, but when a single car accident can bankrupt a family due to exorbitant healthcare coverage, adversarial insurance companies can screw anyone who can't sue them (by not paying out), etc, it's easy to see that there are not enough legal protections for the impoverished when the penalties for victimizing them are a pittance or even nonexistent.
So while I can agree that money *itself* isn't the problem, the modern "idolatry" of it is such a perverting influence that people conflate the two, because frankly it's difficult not to.
@Paulos_the_fog @freemo @rbreich That's quite the generalization there that I'm *sure* is healthy for political discourse 😛
Fundamentally, wealth should be earned according to value production. Some skills are more valuable at a given time in any arbitrary society, and those who are capable of producing the most value should be rewarded accordingly to incentivize them to continue to do so. When this doesn't happen, you get places with high economic inequality due to high rates of political corruption (e.g. the curse of natural resources) rather than alternative, less insidious causes of wealth inequality, and by the Pareto principle, this is the expectation.
Of course, this is assuming the economic system works in a vacuum of purely rational entities with long term thinking being the dominant form of thought. But in the absence of perfection, principles must suffice. I think people should be monetarily rewarded for how much they make society a better place and improve the lives of those around them, and so long as the rules/laws/morals aren't being skirted around in the process, I think that's fine. Once things like patent trolling, pharmaceutical patent extensions, copyright extension lobbying, etc. become a problem then they must be addressed, but these issues are consequences of greed and what I referred to as the "idolatry of money", not wealth itself.
(And of course, I think the wealthy have a moral obligation to help the less fortunate, but I'm less amenable to the government forcing that to occur and in a way that often dilutes the impact the funds have on those individuals who are supposed to be aided due to the impact of middlemen on this redistribution: all those IRS agents have to be paid after all. Not that all taxes are bad, but many are paradoxical in effect.)
