Given a reasonable benchmark of $3 million to retire comfortably in most places in the US, Jeff Bezos could retire a mere 60,000 times. Tell me how a person can "earn" enough money by doing work that produces 60,000 lifetimes worth of wealth. You can't. Instead, Jeff is the beneficiary of a system by which he extracts an increment of the benefit that every person participating in the system derives (presumably over the old system). It boggles the mind that the system allows some people to accrue that much wealth by summing the indirect benefit to other people and yet some other people are stuck spinning their wheels their entire lives.<p>Inequality is extreme.
I find this kind of thing maliciously obtuse. It's malicious because it's designed to breed resentment through unintentional or intentional ignorance.<p>Using Bezos as an example - an interesting proportion would be something like: how many customers (eg, people who find his work valuable) does Bezos have versus an average American? How many people has Bezos employed and made successful (or at the very least, gave them a better job than they would have otherwise?) vs an average American.<p>To wit, it doesn't make sense to compare "wealth" without also talking about "impact" in a case like Bezos.<p>The other ignorant thing is this makes it seem like his wealth is some sort of zero sum game where if he has a dollar that means you don't have it. The reality of his wealth is something like this: he owns a chunk of Amazon, AND Amazon has grown to be valuable and valued. The same guy, had Amazon gone nowhere, would have nothing. The mechanism of him becoming rich is primarily the world collectively deciding that the thing he has built is valuable, rather than him taking dollars out of your pockets.<p>Why does this bother me? Because I find things that breed resentment in the world to be a detrimental evil.
This is old, but still very cool. I like to look at it the other way - here are some stats to make Bezos seem poor:<p>- Invest $8.30 at 10% interest for 250 years and you're richer than Bezos<p>- Jeff Bezos couldn't afford to buy all the houses in Coronado, California (a small island that's approx. 8 square miles of city)<p>- If Bezos put tried to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool with gold coins (a la Scrooge McDuck) it would be less than 6 inches deep before he ran out of money
Wealth inequality is bad.<p>But arguments like the one in the link are pointless - Bezos could have 10x the money he does and it has nothing to do with humanitarian efforts. The government spends way more, countries spend way more and problems don't get fixed.<p>I'd like to see that 9 billion for all cancer treatments graphed against the trillions americans spend on healthcare cumalatively. Or if we really wanted to be snide about it, the total americans spent on pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.<p>Billionaires shouldn't exist because market forces and taxes should eventually chip away at that wealth. But people make it seem like all the world's problems will be solved if billionaires just suddenly lost their wealth.
These are the 'damn lies' form of statistics. It starts out showing 2D representations, then switches to a linear format. It also uses sideways scrolling which is cumbersome than vertical which would be far more natural <i>(but people are too used to scrolling far in this direction so let's do something awkward)</i>.<p>It's hard for me to say what 'dimensionality' accurately portrays magnitude of wealth. Showing us say 2d projections (pictures) of 3D cubes might correlate, but I suspect that it more of a logarithmic than cube root relationship.
What about material goods? My understanding is that this wealth can’t be converted into materials without running into shortages (e.g. Jeff Bezos could theoretically purchase billions of hotdogs or acres or medicine, but in practice we’d run out).<p>I believe we produce over 100% of the food we need to feed everyone but under 200%, and logistics / food waste is another issue. Among the housing crisis there are a lot of vacant apartments and buildings with extra space, but idk if there are enough to give everyone a furnished apartment with plumbing, electricity, proper heating/cooling, and access to community.<p>Also debt. Debt isn’t material so it could be paid with the excess wealth (or the government could just say “your debt is gone”). The problem is that now you have to pay the companies who are owed the debt, and what will they spend the money on? If they just save it like Jeff Bezos, good, but if they spend it on more materials we run into the same issue. And you can’t just not pay the debtors or getting a loan becomes much, much harder.<p>I think inequality is a serious issue, I think it’s very obvious and the website does a great job conveying it. But I also don’t think it’s as simple as “just redistribute the money”. The bigger issue which I think everyone has good reason to want to support is logistics: getting people what they need and want, as efficiently as possible, while reducing waste.
How much do you think Jeff could get of that $185 billion liquid? I've always wondered about these ways of calculating net worth, especially ones including stock. Once they tried to liquidate even a small amount of it, the price would crash as you go lower and lower to find buyers and word gets out you are trying to sell.<p><a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketdepth.asp" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketdepth.asp</a><p>I'd like to see a list of wealthiest individuals based on diversified liquid assets they could reasonably be expected to sell. I always imagine it is some old family that has gold, commodities, treasuries, stocks, real estate, etc. etc.
I may be stupid, but he doesn't have that money, right? We all know this is net worth, and what he has is likely only a small fraction of this. In fact, if he was to try to liquidate this wealth, it would go poof due to how the market works, right?<p>So, why is the author so mad about it? If I make a company and sell one percent to someone for 1000 USD, my net worth would rise by around 100k (as a bad example), but have pretty much none of that. Right? Thats what this is, isn't it? Im sitting there with 1000 bucks which I spend on the next phone, and im dirt poor with a lot of """wealth""".<p>I find these comparisons a bit disingenuous
I think a less radical idea would be to, once and for all, force all billionaires to pay their fair share of taxes and then use the amount they paid extra to solve some of the worlds problems.<p>I didn't do the math so I don't really know what could be done with such sums.
It’s sad to see how dumb (even somewhat educated) people just spread inequality per se as the root cause of all evil or the main problem to adress.<p>We (relatively smart STEM people) must understand that first, there’s ergodicity to inequality and many other more important metrics and issues to address.<p>And second, that it is poor people who need to be helped, not rich people who need to be robbed.<p>Inequality per se shows nothing about the quality of the society.<p>Don’t stand still - educate yourself, educate your friends.<p>We need to be strong and supress dumb people’s narratives. They lead to nothing but wars and destruction :(
Consumption inequality is also an important thing to consider.<p>There's no way Bezos consumes (spends) $180B during his life. As long as he's not spending the wealth, wealth inequality is not a huge problem. He said he plans to give most of his wealth to charity but didn't specify any numbers.<p>Another thought - if he gives all the money to the bottom 60% and they start spending, the net effect would be that economic output would stay roughly constant but consumption would be redirected from the top 40% to the bottom 60%.
I really wish there was another way to scroll.<p>A lot of scroll wheels are, if you can believe it, not made for scrolling dozens of pages worth at a time and some even make noise while doing it!
Money isn't finite, because someone has more than you doesn't mean they are taking from you. Envy isn't a virtue.<p>Focus on what you can change in your life to be better than the old you, don't compare yourself to others, it won't go well.
Is it just me or is there a noticeable increase of the "left to far left" comments on HN recently? I don't remember seeing that much of a "eat the evil rich exploiting the poor and virtuous" stuff here before. People migrating from twitter?
I scrolled through all of Jezz Bezos waealth. Doesn't feel like that much when you scroll through it like that. When I hear the number $185 Billion it sounds like it should be a lot larger
He doesn't literally have all that money liquid to spend. Isn't that just the value of a part of Amazon? And if he tries to turn that into cash wouldn't the value of Amazon crash due to the selloff? I'm not saying he doesn't have tons of wealth or that he deserves this much "leverage" but I think it's disingenuous to make a graph like this trying to compare dollar to dollar value to actual things and how much they cost?
Because Jeff Bezos knows how to create monopolies.<p>He was able to create those monopolies because Republican and Democrat govt's had weakened anti-monopoly laws.<p>Capitalism thrives on competition.
“If you found a company and it’s too successful, that wealth should be taken from you.”
“I see, and who should take the money?”
“The government!”<p>More commie drivel on the front page of HN. I thought this was an entrepreneurship forum?
Now compute all the value Jeff Bezos added to our society. It’s the sum of the value each Amazon customer/seller/employee/investor extracted by using it. I bet it’s an order of magnitude larger.<p>What a tremendous deal we got: such an amazing value at the tiny price of the part Jeff got to keep. No wonder capitalist societies are leapfrogging societies dabbling in various forms of watered down communism.
Yet, if you confiscated (taxed) the entire wealth of the top 400 ($3.2 trillion) that would not even cover an entire year of the U.S. federal budget ($5.5 trillion).<p><a href="https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...</a>
Who cares? All of this is just envy. The author doesn't want the rich person to be rich. It's not about whether everyone is wealthy or not.<p>Let's say we distribute Bezos money to everyone. That's 24 Dollars per person. It would change nothing. Nada.