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85 vs. 3.5 Billion
Plat0nic
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So a recent article just out shows that the wealthiest 85 people in the world have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 3.5 BILLION people. Methinks this isn't a sustainable economic model for the future... Any takers?
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What realistic solution do you propose?
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Wealth distribution.
I have 549 Rock Band Drum and 305 Pro Drum FC's
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So, Oxfam is the primary source and I deem them relatively trustworthy.
Even in developed countries, in order to have a positive net worth, your assets have to exceed your liabilities. At the moment, despite having a car and a nice computer and some cash in the bank, my net worth is probably still pretty close to zero because I have a lot of student debt. I'm still living in relative opulence to pretty much every one else on the planet. So really this doesn't say a hell of a lot.
There are long term problems - wealth could continue to overwhelmingly flow to those who are already wealthy. But it's not a certain bet, and there are much, much more effective measures available to deal with that than "confiscate all their shit and give everyone on the planet $5."
I dunno. If the problem is wealth inequality, your method seems pretty damn effective.
Like, the poorest areas of the US have crappy access to social welfare programs, inadequate public transit, high crime, and so on. The poorest nations have not actually gone through an industrial revolution and/or are ruled by brutal dictators that confiscate all the wealth. They're not the same problems, they're not necessarily stemming from the same issues, and it doesn't even make sense to me to talk about them in the same discussion.
Only in the purely mathematical sense. The dude in Gambia's life is probably not going to be markedly improved by a one-time $5 payment, especially since it'll have drastic inflationary effects in his local area.
Also huge parts of South America and portions of Oceania--we only don't immediately think it because the populations aren't as high.
The solution in each instance is still fundamentally wealth distribution, though (which necessitates having a functioning state / government that is more than just a family living in a palace surrounded by guys with machine guns). Progressive taxes that are used to establish infrastructure, leading to higher prevalence of education & less subsistence living, leading to large scale development, leading to community services, leading to something resembling an egalitarian society.
Nothing changes or improves so long as one asshole sits on all of the bullion.
EDIT: Besides that, it's still a flatly unethical situation.
"Why do Americans / Canadians / British citizens live in personal mansions while people in the Congo live in dirt huts at best? Why don't your distribution networks cover a larger area?"
"Because we've arbitrarily assigned borders & national identities that exclude people. Mostly brown people. Tough luck,"
Also, it wouldn't be $5.
1% of World's population has $110,000,000,000,000
World population: About 7,140,000,000
So, it would be about $15,400 per person if we distributed the 1%'s wealth.
I say it is pitchfork time.
Yeah, no.
Pretty sure that dude in Gambia would be freaking stoked.
There isn't really a huge difference between economic inequality and economic immobility.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That's over 15,000 dollars for every person in the world. Or 31,000 for the bottom half.
Not that I agree with this thought experiment, but we are talking about a lot more than 5 bucks a person. There are only 7 billion and change people On earth. One sufficiently rich guy could give everyone a fiver.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Makes me think of a political cartoon I saw once. A bunch of people on a street, bubbles above them listing their assets, debts and a net value that's negative for everyone.
And then a homeless person with $3.50 positive net value.
Sure, in the same sense that the cure for both cancer and the flu are "health care".
"Progressive taxation and more money spent on infrastructure and development" is a great plan for the US. How do you go about implementing that in RuthlessWarlord-istan, practically speaking? In the US, you engage in activism and write letters to your congressman and maybe run for office. To help RWistan, you... write him a letter? Run for the office of vice-warlord? What if we're talking a nation that doesn't have a terrible dictator, but is just dirt-fucking-poor? "Tax your rich people more!" Okay, what if the place doesn't have many rich people to begin with?
Point being, addressing income inequality in our own nation is not the same thing as addressing income inequality between our nation and another nation halfway around the world with its own sovereignty and socioeconomic environment. We can't necessarily even just give them money, because how do we get it into the right places? We can't just airdrop infrastructure and hope they build it. We can't go in there and build it for them without their okay.
They are fundamentally different problems and it doesn't make sense to lump them together.
For the five minutes it took for hyperinflation to make his nation's economy asplode, yeah, it'd probably be pretty rad.
This seems like the same argument folks use against raising the minimum wage.
Or if we maybe don't have enough troops at the time, lets just send weapons to the people fighting against the warlord, so they can liberate themselves. Maybe with some training and selective CAS.
The west, and the U.S. in particular, has solved (or 'solved', depending on your perspective) - when they feel it has been politically prudent for them to do so - such situations before, in South Korea & Israel. Both were countries spun more or less whole cloth out of huge sums of U.S. financial aid & deal brokering, and both were countries with extremely limited infrastructure & ruled by warlords prior to the floor being raised. The west set-up the funds and acted as an interim body for distributing the wealth / building the infrastructure until either country took on it's own agency and began acting under their own power.
We were able to fund the development of Jarusalem in the middle of a fucking desert and the development of Seoul in a blasted marsh while white hot guerrilla warfare & pogroms were ongoing. There's zero reason to think the same couldn't be done for communities elsewhere - we just choose not to.
And there are people alive right now with weapons and the willingness to use them who think that neither of those countries you used as examples should exist. They hate us for being instrumental in creating them. And this has led to some of the most intractable foreign policy problems on the planet today.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
And perhaps - just perhaps - if the west had been willing to also bring Egypt, Syria, Jordan, North Korea & China off of their knees instead of deciding to fight proxy wars with them, we wouldn't have those problems.
EDIT: Besides that, it wasn't the issue of nation building that brought on the anger. It was the U.S. deciding to choose a side in a fight.
Injecting massive amounts of superficial wealth into an economy is vastly different from adjusting the balance of wealth distribution in an economy. One is printing money. The other is changing how existing money is distributed.
On the other hand, a hypothetical opposite attitude that we can just throw cash at problems until those problems disappear is not productive either. Unless you're willing to put troops on the ground and shoot people (which I'm not terribly inclined to do) in the name of humanitarian aid, there are places where any aid (even certain fungible/transportable forms of in-kind aid) will get vacuumed up by dudes with guns.
Yet, on the third hand, you don't fix anything without money, and unless people are convinced to give money to humanitarian causes (either by pulling at their heartstrings, promising an eventual profit, or requiring them to do so via taxation), nothing gets done. To paraphrase Bill Maher, the rich are like money pinatas - sometimes they don't give up their precious loots unless you beat them with a stick.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
e:^Also this is totally a thing now.
And what happens when you say, "Okay, People's Republic of Bananistan, we'll raise your people out of poverty, too."
And then the People's Dictator of Bananistan says, "Great! I'm going to use that money to line my Banana Palace!"
And then we say, "No, you were supposed to buy food for the Banananians with that money!"
And then the People's Dictator of Bananistan says, "Over my dead body! I'd rather burn my Banana Palace down than give that money to the unwashed plebes!"
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Also before the Nationalize XYZ drum gets beat too hard; I think Venezuelans experience with PDVSA is pretty instructive.
But they already have Bananas?
I don't have an issue, just in general.
This strikes me as worse than the, "It's a different kind of problem that is really difficult to solve" reaction.
The casual dismissal of human suffering, in particular.
The simple fact itself doesn't suggest that there is human suffering involved.
That there are some arbitrary number of rich people and some arbitrarily large number of really poor people is not interesting to me at all.
there are a lot of people in those two countries
Africa's still a mess but it's not as big a mess as it was during the Cold War, and a lot of the current mess can be put down to endemic HIV
There's always money in the Banana Stand!