I disagree on the the thrust of the argument - that people (including comparatively wealthy individuals like doctors and lawyers) oppose changes to tackle wealth inequality because they don’t understand the gulf of wealth between them and the ultra rich. In my experience it has nothing to do with that - rather these people know that <i>they</i> will ultimately end up as the main target for any such law, not these billionaires. Time and time again the wealth of the middle classes ends up as collateral damage in attempts to tax the very top.
I'm learning economic concepts so some of my notions and questions end up being naive. Would appreciate if someone could clarify/answer this.<p>It's a fair guess that vast majority of Bezos's wealth is in Amazon equities. Which are valued as such by the participants in US equity market. A thought exercise, what would happen if he were to liquidate <i>all</i> of that $180+B in equities? Safe to say he will get less than $180B in <i>cash</i> that could he could use for charities, moonshot projects etc.,<p>There's also a matter of confidence. How will the markets react if the founder of Amazon were to liquidate his Amazon holdings? So it seems to me that not all of his wealth is <i>usable</i>. Does it mean we need better ways of gauging wealth? Especially when trying to assert things like "X% of his wealth is enough to house all homeless veterans for an year". His wealth is locked up in <i>some</i> form which though is valued in USD won't translate 1-1 to other forms of wealth.
The rich aren't the enemy, rent-seekers are.<p>They may overlap, and Bezos may be both, but wealth and capital on their own are orthogonal to justice.<p><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EHKZRLcW4AA1aju?format=jpg&name=medium" rel="nofollow">https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EHKZRLcW4AA1aju?format=jpg&name=...</a>
While I love the UX of this site and how well executed it is, I think it’s spreading misconceptions about how the world works.<p>Human behavior is driven by contagious imitation (monkey-see monkey-do), and we all pile into the same behaviors at the same time, so this inequality will always exist. No matter how equitable the system.<p>Of all the content on the internet, 1% of it gets 99% of the traffic. Of all the movies on Netflix, 1% get 99% of the eyeballs. Of all the businesses on earth, 1% get 99% of the customers. Of all the stocks in the stock market, a tiny percentage generate ALL of the returns. I could go on and on.<p>Fundamentally, value-creation in a connected world results in an exponential (log) function, not a linear one.<p>And people’s brains turn to mush when trying to comprehend exponential vs. linear growth.<p>You can look at similar wealth curves in the supposedly more equitable nordics to see how similar they are if scaled up to a population the size of the US. On an exponential curve, extending the x-axis 100X further results in equally extreme outcomes like Jeff Bezos.<p>Basically, everything humans do results in extreme inequality.<p>So while we should certainly raise taxes on the mega-rich, the goal shouldn’t be eliminating exponential inequality altogether. Because it’s a base property of humanity.
I don't understand the concept or the graphics are rendered wrong on my computer.<p>Better would it be do explain with a standard distribution (what wealth isn't). Lets assume that 1 SD of income corresponds to 10 cm. So 3SD or 60cm, basically your screen size, corresponds to 99.7% of the population.<p>Some random data from the internet:
"The median household income in Franklin County Ohio is about $43,000 although the average household income is closer to $54,000. The standard deviation of household incomes is about $30,000. You pick a random sample of 50 households. What is the chance the average household income in your sample is over $60,000?"
<a href="https://online.stat.psu.edu/stat100/lesson/8/8.3" rel="nofollow">https://online.stat.psu.edu/stat100/lesson/8/8.3</a><p>Household income may be even two earners. But assuming broadly 50k, sd 50k per person to make it easier and taking into account more affluent areas, only a few people make more than 200k per year.<p>Now lets assume Bill Gates or the Oligarch of your choice makes 10% ROE on his wealth. If he has 100 Billion, this is 10 Billion a year. This should be 200,000 Standard Deviations. If one SD corresponds to 10 cm, this should be 20 km on our scale.<p>So we can see the income of 99.7% of the population on our screen, but Bill Gates income would be 20 km away.<p>(Hope I made no mistake, feel free to correct)<p>PennState used an extraordinary bad example to teach the normal distribution, they chose a case where you have a fat tail distribution.
Nice graphic, but also a bit misleading.<p>Bezos would never be able to immediately realise that amount of assets in to useful cash. So saying no human deserves this amount of wealth is kind of already fulfilled? He may have 2 or 3 billion as cash maybe.
Why is it a problem for Jeff Bezos to have this much wealth?<p>As a human society, we produce and we consume things. It sucks if some people consume a lot and not enough is left for others. I'd rather see us pile on people who overconsume rather than on those who overproduce.
A lot of the comments (not all) really personalize the issue by using Jeff Bezos as the villain, when it's the system and laws that have allowed him to capture so much wealth that is the problem. And IMHO, that's the part that needs addressing, by putting a progressive tax in place.<p>Jeff's not the enemy - he's been amazingly successful within the rules that we as a society have made. Some of these rules are oppressive and bad and we should fix them.
A simple calculation can show that, with just defense budget of top 10 country, the world could install enough solar cell to power the world day and night, forever. But will we do it ? I don’t think things can go stupider that this. Future generations will see us in the same level of stupidity with which we see flat earth believer from centuries ago.
Nice work!<p>People don't really have an understanding of how much wealth has been coalescing in the last thirty years and this is a good start as showing them how skewed things really are.<p>Seriously; this is dangerous. Concentrating that much wealth in such few hands is bound to have negative consequences. And all of us professionals really should get onboard trying to tackle this.
The top 400 wealthiest could purchase 246 Nimitz class aircraft carriers, and still have about $2B in change ($5M each). The US has 10 (of 20 total US carriers). Or, put another way, the top 400 could duplicate the <i>entire</i> US Navy fleet 5 times over (so, like, 55 super carriers, 100 carriers, 340 destroyers, 330 submarines, 2560 F/A-18E/F, etc.) and still have $370B in change ($925M each).
Missing: median US Black household wealth, $24,100; median US Hispanic household wealth, $36,100. Numbers as of 2019.<p><a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...</a>
Re: "No single human needs or deserves this much wealth."
Thanks for your opinion. That's all it is. There's no validity to that position. Wealth is not based on need or "deserving". In Jeff's case it's based on smart business, hard work and accomplishment. What have you accomplished?
I'm always wondering how the capital gains work for the rich, or rather how they work around it. In case he sells the Amazon stock, it means he is due 28.6% American capital gains tax ie. 53 billion USD? I don't think so... the wealth of the richest basically have multiplied in the last 2 years...
I can think of no better illustration of the inequality in our society than this: the poor and middle class drink £5 bottles of wine purchased from Aldi, while the rich drink <i>£50,000</i> bottles of wine. It’s truly shocking.
I am most grateful for my Logitech MX Master 2 mouse scroll wheel and a shift key. Hold shift, give the scroll wheel enough momentum to undo the parking brake, and let physics do the rest.
Bezos's wealth comes out to be about $500 per person.<p>I would be more than happy to pay $500 to another Bezos that provides my life was as much value.<p>Amazon is so convenient!
Best way to wrap your mind around wealth.<p>1 thousand seconds = 16.6 minutes<p>1 million seconds = 11 days, 13 hours<p>1 billion seconds = 32 <i>years</i><p>1 trillion seconds = 31,688 <i>years</i>
I find these scrolling websites unergonomic and not at all that good at getting the point across (other than "yeah, it's a lot").<p>Also, with the text-length budget of that site I think it's a shame it doesn't explain what wealth, profit, liquidity and cash-on-hand is.<p>Better visualisations imo:<p>- Tom Scott: A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg</a><p>- How rich are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in Minecraft terms <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvttV8EIoGA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvttV8EIoGA</a>
xkcd's "Money" graphic gives a sense of other value comparisons, in a somewhat logarithmic sense, ranging from $1 to the roughly $2.4 quadrillion dollars of all human economic activity to date (as of 2012 when the infographic was made).<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/980/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/980/</a>