Wealth Inequalities Shown to the Scale

This is often the problem I see with people mixing up <i>Wealth</i> and <i>Income</i>. A person with $100K income could also have millions of <i>wealth</i> or asset from stocks to property. Jeff Bezos has most of this wealth from Stocks. And I am willing to bet $100 given the current market cap and PE or PEG, his resignation from the company and liquidations of his Amazon Asset will trigger a sell off that its value differs quite a lot to his current value.<p>Someone might as well set up a gaming site called How to Become A Billionaire. Simply paid the cheapest amount of money to set a a company somewhere, issues a billion shares and get someone to buy one share for a dollar.<p>While I do agree on the world in large has inequality problem. Focusing on the ultra rich doesn&#x27;t fix it.

Couple of issues I have when I see such graphs or scale of inequality. I&#x27;m referring to those wealthy people who want to use their good fortune for benefit of society, not all of them.<p>1. Usually these comparisons imply that the super rich have a major chunk of their wealth sitting as cold hard cash. That&#x27;s hardly the case. Most of the wealth is in assets or illiquid forms. Take Bezos for ex, a good chunk of his wealth is in AMZN stock. If he sells all of it to fund a philanthropic scheme, that&#x27;d trigger a massive selloff in the stock market and impact a lot of people negatively. Not saying that they&#x27;re helpless, but I think they may be doing some good with all the excess cash that we may not be aware of.<p>2. From a logistics point of view, it&#x27;s hard to ensure that money intended to help someone reaches them. Unless you are personally delivering the money, there&#x27;ll be middle men who take their cut. If a billionaire decides to spend a billion dollars on charity, I&#x27;d think a bunch of orgs would want that money, to do charity as well as run their non-profit operation. Which would make it appear that not enough is being done by the billionaire, when it is employing a few and benefiting some more.

Feels like the author keeps making this point over and over that if we could just take x million from these people we could fix so many things. But I don’t see any vision painted for this new world where now everything is OK and fair. Maybe the current system we got is what makes people build things like amazon. Maybe jeff gets to be proud of his wealth and makes his own philanthropy choices.

Looking at the scale is kind of interesting, but what we really need is more information about options for making things more equal in terms of their relative effectiveness and trade offs. America used to have 90% income tax on the richest. At some level that kind of worked, but it also led to a shell game where executives drove company cars to company condos and so on. Agreeing on reasonable taxation and enforcement could go a long way but we keep on minimizing land value taxation and other such alternatives.

If you made $7000&#x2F;hr since the birth of Jesus, you&#x27;d still have less money than Jeff Bezos.

I wonder if side-scrolling was chosen intentionally. Side-scrolling is so much more annoying because you cant press space or page down to scroll faster.

A general strike [is needed][1] around the world demanding a basic income of between $1000 to $2000 a month for all human beings, and a one-time payment of around $100,000 to each person when they reach 25 years of age, financed by a [progressive tax][2] on the wealthiest people in the planet.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tbray.org&#x2F;ongoing&#x2F;When&#x2F;201x&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;01&#x2F;Piketty-Capital" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tbray.org&#x2F;ongoing&#x2F;When&#x2F;201x&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;01&#x2F;Piketty-C...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.harvard.edu&#x2F;gazette&#x2F;story&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;pikettys-new-book-explores-how-economic-inequality-is-perpetuated&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.harvard.edu&#x2F;gazette&#x2F;story&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;pikettys-new-...</a>

It&#x27;s in the interest of the super-rich to advocate for a strong social safety net to prevent millions of hungry people with nothing to lose from taking what they need instead of waiting for it to be shared. ...at least until they can build a colony on Mars or something?

The confusion of wealth and income is big with this one. All of the comparisons, unfortunately, don&#x27;t make any sense.

“Around 800 children will die of malaria today. A small group of super rich people could stop it for a sum of money so small that they would likely never even notice its absence. But they choose not to.”<p>Brutal.<p>The theoretical appeal of capitalism is that it allocates resources efficiently, is it not? Can someone explain to me how letting all these children die of malaria is efficient, given the cost&#x2F;benefit of eliminating it? Is our economic system really allocating those resources in the best way?<p>Edit: come on guys if you’re going to downvote me then try to think of a reason I’m wrong..

I think this is a false equivalency. How much of the wealth is convertible to cash ? I think its 1% at best ... so bezos is worth 100 million.<p>Every years budget for U.S is in trillions, so its pointless to go after wealth of private people.<p>Even if we were to take the wealth of the richest, do you expect the government to spend it, with all the bureaucracy ? Even if you hand wave all the cash ... malaria and hygiene are not going to fix themselves without feet on the ground.

It&#x27;s quite clear that billionaires don&#x27;t care about this. They will part ways with their money in a way they see fit. If it means donations to non-profits they own, or off-shore companies to lessen the amount of taxes they have to pay, then they will do just that.<p>All this talk about inequality is for naught. You don&#x27;t have to tell Bezos how big his slice of the pie is. He knows. And he will take more by any means necessary.