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Richest 2% Own Half the World's Wealth
kop writes "The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth, according to a new study by a United Nations research institute. Most previous studies of economic disparity have looked at income, whereas this one looks at wealth — assets minus debts. The survey is based on data for the year 2000. Many figures, especially for developing countries, have had to be estimated. Nonetheless, the authors say it is the most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken." The study itself is available from the World Institute for Development Economics Research.
between the current state and the feudal times.
It is possibly very hard to create such comparison given that probably the definition of wealth changed, the definition of feudal times is loose, the overall human population was much less and the world used to be much more fragmented back then. I think that 500 years is a nice round number, so a comparison between 1500 and 2000 could be made with some difficulty. Hard, but I don't think it's impossible.
Currently my gut feeling tells me that the "wealth" used to be even more centralized in those times, but we probably made some progress in social equality since then. I'd be interested to see in the amount of progress though.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Good for the economy, but bad for the 80% in my opinion... but then I can joke about it because I live in one of the wealthy countries mentioned, but I guess if I didn't I probably wouldn't be writing this
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed (SK)
For the good of humanity we must take all that wealth and re-distribute it equitably! But before we do, we might want to check out some countries that have tried that. The results aren't pretty (for example Zimbabwe).
Seriously, the wealthy of the world can be divided into kleptocrats, heirs, and entrepreneurs. As far as I'm concerned, you can shoot the former. Certainly not the second, though you may debate the merits of inheritance tax (which I'm personally against). Mess with the third at the peril of your nations well being.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Housing has been rather screwy lately after the mad rush we had in '05. Like all things, the market eventually starts to correct itself. Gotta love supply and demand.
In general the places with starving kids aren't attracting the interest of the mega-rich so how can you blame them? In fact when Western companies bring employment to poorer countries it's looked on as exploitation or off-shoring and they get dog's abuse anyway.
I heard a guest speaker on Minnesota Public Radio (NPR affiliate) say just a week or two ago that in America, even if you live at the poverty line of a household $9000 annualy, you are still in the top 12% of richest people in the world. I hope that puts some perspective here. That said, I bet at least a tenth of slashdot users qualify in the top 2%.
Logic check.
/. crowd. But it's net benefit (and sustainably so) for the whole community, far, far more than the $5 would help ANYONE.
/. crowd believes of all "rich" people...it's not like they ever work for it, right?), it's POSSIBLE. But where does he waste it? Cars, luxury items, food, drugs - all of which again benefit (to a lesser degree) local businesses.
What's better for a group of a million people?
Each of them get +$5, or one of them gets $5 million?
If the "one" is an entrepreneur or small businessman, he can likely parlay that $5 million into a significant investment to grow his business, and probably result in at least 5-6 PERMANENT jobs with an annual salary/value of $30k-$40k per year. That additional workforce could allow him to grow his business further, possibly snowballing into more jobs, more business, etc. This ALSO means more tax revenue for the local government, more $ for schools, playgrounds, streets, fire depts, etc.
This is called growth, and it's a good thing for a community.
Does it help everyone equally? NO, and that's why it's so offensive to the leftish
Is it possible that the $5 mill goes to some indolent rich person who wastes it? Sure (and this is pretty much what the
-Styopa
"Tax breaks for the rich?! DUH only the rich can get 'em cause the botom 50% is getting the money."
Another interpretation of the statistics would be that the bottom 50% aren't paying much taxes because.... they don't have any money to pay taxes with. But I like your logic better. Allow me therefore to paraphrase:
Statistics show that the top 50% all die eventually.
Consequently, the bottom 50% obviously live forever!
This is A Conspiracy Against Rich People ®. THE GOVERNMENT MUST CUT TAXES FOR POOR, UNDERPRIVILEGED RICH PEOPLE!
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
This is odd:
0.001 euro's and you get: You're in the TOP 68.98% richest people in the world!
Now try 0 euro and the result is: You're in the TOP 68.98% richest people in the world!
Amazing 31.02% procent of the world population has an income of less than nothing!
It's the same for negative numbers.
Read, refresh, repeat.
There's two parts here it seems like you are completely missing. The first that the OP is not suggesting anything, he's just giving a rundown of who pays the most taxes. He didn't even disparage the idea of "progressive" taxation, he's just spelling out what the end result is.
The problem is that President Bush signed an across the board tax cut. Each bracket's taxes were lowered by the same percentage. Since 50% of the people were generally not paying any taxes at all anyway, they complained the tax cuts were for the "rich" and that lower income people (lower 50%) received no benefit at all.
Well, yes, the argument is true - people paying no taxes don't generally benefit from tax cuts, but I fail to see a valid complaint. In fact, after the tax cuts, because now even fewer people are paying any taxes at all, the "rich" are actually paying a higher percentage of the income tax burden than they were before.
An interesting analogy that I've always liked.
There's also the myth that the disparity of income is increasing between the rich and the poor. Well, if person "a" earns $1,000,000 and person "b" earns $50,000, then person "a" makes $950,000 more than "b". If they both increase their income by 10%, then "a" makes $1,100,000 and "b" makes $55,000. A difference of $1,045,000. OMG! The income disparity is increasing! But their relative buying power remains exactly the same!
People are not putting things in perspective when they complain about the disparity between the rich and poor. They don't even take into account that someone making $100,000 in San Fransisco has very little buying power compared to someone making $50k in Atlanta - and the guy in S.F. is paying disproportionately higher taxes because cost of living is not a factor in calculating taxes owed.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Shell games. There aren't that many people that make even $100,000 a year. Six figure salaries are pretty much a falsehood for the average American no matter what TV might try to convince us of. I also don't trust the U.S. census of 2000 due to the damage it did in my state. It made Columbus Ohio the "largest" city in Ohio by incorporating all the cow towns around it. The REAL largest city in Ohio is Greater Cleveland IF we played the same game and incorporated the entire surrounding county into Cleveland proper. The end result is that Cleveland lost a LOT of federal funding and it all went to Columbus. This has caused somewhat of a boom in the Columbus area while killing off Cleveland. We've been losing businesses and the associated jobs thanks to census games. I suspect that the 95th percentile number was merely a numbers game to try and make it seem like there are more wealthy people in the U.S. than there really are.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It is hard to know where to begin in replying to this post, so I guess we'll just start with the top:
This is to be expected. People work disproportionately as well. High intelligence is distributed in a very similar curve.
So, you are assuming that wealth is distributed along some merit based system based on hard work and brains? So, how do explain the railroad moguls who built their fortunes by exploiting immigrant Chinese labor, and forcing small farmers off their land with hired guns and goon squads? How about the textile families who forced women, immigrants, and children to work 10 - 15 hours a day, six days a week for most of the late 19th and early 20th century? How about the British colonial officials who were carried around on litters to supervise the production of Indian tea?
Looking at the other side of the coin, how do explain Paris Hilton? Are trying to tell me that she sits where she is because she is brilliant and hard-working?
All this boils down to a fundamentally flawed assumption on your part about great wealth is accumulated. It doesn't happen through hard work. It happens when capital is amassed and then reinvested in the generation of yet more capital. In other words, a cycle of accumulation that can work even if the owner of the wealth doesn't do anything but raise himself up off the couch long enough to say "I pay you to make money, so you better go get more, or I will not pay you again." Since the distribution of wealth has been uneven since before the renaissance, hard work need have little to do with it.
Think back to the 1900s, or even late 1800s. People that were just scraping by would often not even survive.
Ok, it is true that in the 18th and 19th century it was even harder to get wealthy (or just get by) then it is today. However, in the 1940s through 1970s, there was a general reduction in the disparity between rich and poor. It was at this time that many fortunes were made in manufacturing, oil exploration, housing, and other war time and post-war activities. But taxes were much higher and the distribution of wealth today is more like it was in the 1900s, when it was very difficult to get rich when, then it is like the mid-20th century, when there was more socio-economic mobility. Uneven wealth distribution and social mobility are inversely proportional, my friend.
Just because there are enormously wealthy people doesn't mean you're prevented from acquiring wealth yourself. in fact, it makes you all the more likely to be able to get rich.
Here you make the assumption that everyone aspires to be a multi-billionaire. That seems flawed, as well. Many judeo-christian and non-western moral teachings warn of the dangers associated with accumulating great fortunes. There are many wealthy people who are perfectly decent folks, but, to paraphrase comedian Chris Rock, in many cases, it is true that "behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
Quit being so classist. Just because others have done well doesn't mean you can't, but you surely can't if all you do is gripe about how you deserve more money without doing anything to earn it.
Tell me again who's being classist here? Your argument basically affirms socio-economic distinctions - the differences between the rich and poor (also known as classes) - as part of the natural social and moral order. If any argument is "classist," it would be yours.
And by the way, speaking of people who gripe about deserving more money without doing anything to earn it, may I refer you again to Paris Hilton?
I've never been 100% certain whether tremendous wealth has positive or negative social consequences, but at least I have some kind of notion of reality.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -Richard Feynman
Actually, even if you're making minimum wage ($5.15 in most states), you fall within the top 15%, according to this site. The real shell game being played here is the use of the global population as a statistic when the cost of living varies so greatly across the globe. A guy making $100,000 in California isn't really as rich as a guy making $100,000 in Kansas. And there are a lot more of those guys in California.
This 2% b.s. is a pretty meaningless statistic, all things considered. You only need to be making 44k a year to hit that.
But you're picking on a tiny fraction of the wealthy in this country; the vast majority of "rich" people made their money (reference "The Millionaire Next Door"), they earned it and they were taxed when they earned it.
If I can give another analogy of two people making $75k a year.
One guy rents a nice apartment in the uptown area of the city he works and leases a new car every two years and doesn't save enough to invest an significant amount.
The other guy scrimps and saves and invests all he can manage. He lives in a moderate house near the city, but not in it, and drives a financed automobile until it becomes economically wiser to trade it in then to keep repairing it.
The second guy has paid income tax on all the money he's earned; the money he's invested is taxed money. So the money he makes in capital gains is a lot less than it would be... this is the benefit of 401ks, you get to invest the money pre-taxes, but then you have to pay taxes on it when withdrawn. A Roth IRA isn't taxed because it's built with already taxed money.
Taxing capital gains is a form of double taxation. This is why you need to start off your argument with "if I was sitting on a huge pile of money" as opposed to "if I earned a huge pile of money that was already taxed."
So you look at the caricatures of wealthy people; the Paris Hilton's and Nicole Richies of the world, the poster children for excess, and complain they aren't paying taxes because it was "given" to them by their parents. But these people represent only a tiny fraction of the wealthy people in this country. The whole system of taxation we currently have simply punishes people for achievement. It's one of the reasons I support the Fair Tax. Poor people (below poverty levels) not only wouldn't pay a damn penny in taxes, but they'd get more money and have more spending power then they do now even if prices didn't go down. It's a system where you're punished for spending on non-necessities. Who spends the most on non-necessities? People like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie - these are the people you think of when wealth envy rears it's ugly head, aren't they the people you want to "punish" for being born rich?
Stupid sexy Flanders.