Say you’re on a yacht with your principal and they had a few tequilas, and then they’re like, “Oh, come on. Join us.” Ultimately, you have to remember that you are there because they’re paying you. It’s a job. They’re not your friend. Obviously, you need to share compassion and empathy. Sometimes your boss needs you to be a shoulder to cry on.
I don’t know what kind of math you’re using, but Half of all the wealth in the world is ABSOLUTELY enough for everyone to live modest but not impoverished lives.
It ABSOLUTELY is not. That extreme wealth is the result of extreme exploitation of poor people and societal structures designed specifically to benefit the already rich at the expense of everyone else and of hoarding of resources that are thus kept from everyone else.
I don’t know if you’re aware of it or not, but you’re spreading insidious disinformation that the ultra-rich and their pr teams employ to minimize perception of their wealth and deleterious effect on society as a whole.
It’s important to note that for this specific situation/question, percentages (i.e. “half of all wealth”) aren’t actually useful. Depending on what the actual flat numbers are, it would still be possible for “half of all wealth” evenly distributed to the entire population of the planet to not be a lot of money per person.
That being said, I looked at your linked article which actually includes the flat numbers which means you can do the math and see what an even distribution of wealth amounts to for each and every person.
That article claims that in 2022, total global wealth was 418.3 trillion. Looking elsewhere for total global population in 2022, I’m finding ~8 billion. Those numbers give us a per person wealth value of ~52K. It’s important to note that this isn’t a yearly salary - it represents the sum total of all assets each person would have. Also important to note that the population number includes children - something like global adult population would likely be more useful but I couldn’t easily find that number.
So 52K is our answer, but interpreting it is I think a very complex question all on it’s own. I have no idea if this amounts to a “modest” living or even what “modest” really means (PCs? Air Conditioning? Year round access to global fruit supplies?). I thought for a long time that if we could evenly distribute wealth that everyone could live a “good” life - but the numbers might literally not shake out for that. I still hope they do. I want them to. But I’ve never seen a clear answer. Also, this isn’t an argument against an even distribution of wealth. I think it’s ethically correct to evenly distribute wealth basically no matter what. I just don’t know if anyone knows what the lives of people would really look like in that scenario.
Someone elsewhere here wrote it out explicitly, and provided a couple sources, so you don’t have to guess.
The global top 1.1% is like the Western top 10%, so a lot of people that you’d think of as ordinary. Doctors and lawyers, middle managers who have saved as much as they can and are near retirement. Actually, I’m guessing people’s retirement funds make up a shocking amount of this, because it’s such a common form of wealth. Most of the world’s people live paycheck-to-paycheck, or a family-centric version thereof, which is what the other big chunk is about. Their contribution is literally just the items they use to live day to day, times billions of heads.
It’s true, if we diverted even a good chunk of that to the world’s poorest we’d have no humanitarian problems at all. Try convincing your average Westerner to give up a noticeable percentage of what they own to Africans, though.
No. I realise we’ve left the realm of facts and moved into a political debate, but it has more to do with some funny math. If exploitation was all it took, there’s a lot of poor assholes that would be rich. That’s all that’s worth the time to say.
For the record, I’m still team eat the rich. You have to actually do boring homework stuff and go to long meetings if you want to sustainably address it, though. Otherwise you’ll be just another leftist organisation that splinters months down the road.
The difference here is how much of that is you actually need. The people in question have to waste it even though they use loopholes of loopholes to not pay their fair share in tax.
Okay. Honestly I doubt the difference is that noticeable to someone in a slum who just wants some plain rice to stave off hunger. I don’t really see how it connects back to the larger discussion, either. Like I said, we all agree billionaires are bad.