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'The Second Gilded Age Is Upon Us' (theguardian.com)
Robotron23 writes: Wealth inequality is at its highest since the turn of the 20th century -- the so-called 'Gilded Age' -- as the proportion of capital held by the world's 1,542 dollar billionaires swells further. The report, commissioned by the Swiss banking giant UBS and UK accounting company PwC, discusses the impacts of technology and globalization on the situation, and arrives weeks after the IMF recommended that the world's richest pay higher taxes to ease the disparity of wealth.
I should write a cookbook! ... Wait, never mind.
I'll call it "100 Recipes for Cooking Rich People!"
It's brilliant! Everyone will spend their last few dollars to buy it!
I'll be rich!!!
Guillotines serve no purpose. If you look at what happened in France, you just got a different type of tyrant, a far more dangerous one running the country. Same happened in Russia.
Chopping off a nasty head doesn't mean you'll get a nice new one. We do need change but it shouldn't come with a sharp blade.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
how rich other people are is un important.
Well, unless they have so much wealth that they can distort markets - particularly the housing market - or have disproportionate influence in politics.
in our country alone the poorest of the poor are still better off than the rich in many places around the world.
The median net worth of the bottom quintile of American households is about -$6000. That means they have less than nothing. Everything is borrowed. So what do you consider the poor and what do you consider rich elsewhere? What do you know about the homeless? What do you know about alcohol and drug addicts? What do you know about prison inmates working for next to nothing?
Get out of here with your "poor people should stop being so uppity and be thankful for what they have" garbage. The poorest of the poor ain't got shit.
Wealth inequality of the 1% is not a problem so long as the 99% are taken care of too. Not everyone needs their own private jet. So long as a family can buy a house, a car, put their kids through college and pay for health care -basically cover their needs and have a few luxuries too, that family shouldn't care that some other family has a castle in the south of France. And that family is not going to care. And that's fine. Where the problems will start is when a sizable portion of the population CAN'T afford their basic needs. That's how people like Trump gets elected.
Lol if us means USA then no, your poorest are definitively not better off since the lack of decent health care or labor laws. In fact they will be much better off in most other countries.
Currencies may not be pegged to Gold anymore, but that doesn't mean they are limitless. A limitless currency has no value. Growth has to be restricted for it to be useful, and if only a small percentage of the population consume all of that growth (or more than the growth, as is the case today) then those billionaires will prevent you from living a better life than your parents.
Capitalism is the best system we have for efficiently managing resources, but it is not perfect. It has a natural tendency to accumulate wealth at the top. If left unchecked all of the wealth gets trapped at the top and the whole system collapses. This is why you need the counterbalance of a government taking money from the top to inject it on the bottom.
If you have ever played Monopoly you can see this in action. The victory condition for Monopoly is one player controlling all of the money and properties, but this also represents a complete collapse of the game's economy. No more commerce will happen, the money instantly becomes useless paper. One much reviled but popular house rule in Monopoly is to put all fees in the Free Parking space and award those fees to anybody who lands there. This is a very crude form of wealth redistribution, and what does it do? It redistributes wealth to the players, causing games to go on for much longer than normal. In the real world we want the economy to keep working forever, we need to redistribute the wealth.
I read the internet for the articles.
The uber-rich really are selfish and shortsighted. Selfish I understand, but the shortsightedness is ridiculous. No matter how nice the masses have it (and at least where I live, you have to be pretty poor before you're not 'rich' in a global or historical context), when a relatively small number of people have so much wealth they can buy and sell the rest of us without a care in the world... the masses will eventually revolt.
Sorry, but I don't think history supports that claim. The peasants didn't revolt because their lords and kings were rich and powerful, almost every revolt came when there was a crisis that drove the lowest in society to desperation. The French revolution? Oppression + food shortage. The Russian revolution? Tired of war + food shortage. Even the fall of the Soviet Union was mostly because the stores were empty and the rubles almost worthless. That Roman that coined the term "bread and circus" was mostly spot on, as long as you got food stamps and TV most people are placated.
Take a look at all the people who quite willingly vote for a "strong leader" because they don't really care about freedom or civil rights, they want a strong economy and order. As long as they can make some money (bread) and spend that money (circus) without too much interference they're happy to be a cog in the machinery. Take a look at China, I know everybody here wants to remind about Tiananmen Square but it's 25+ years ago and in a booming economy the masses just aren't remotely unhappy enough to support a revolution. Venezuela, maybe. But it's increasingly rare.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There seems to be this notion that capitalism and socialism are binary concepts, and that socialism and communism are the same. The truth is, they are on a spectrum, with capitalism and communism at the extremes. Somewhere along the spectrum is likely the optimum solution. Where productivity is high, and inequality is low. Everyone is too focused on the advantages and disadvantages of the extremes to explore the area in between.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".