they are comparing net worth, and even in america most people are worth 0 (or less). so yeah, lowly me is worth more than half a billion people, but their combined wages (even minute) would dwarf mine. but its not like you could take the 1%'s wealth and give it to everyone else and it would make any meaningful impact.
even if you took the top 10 richest people in the world and gave it to every person in just america, thats only about 1600$/person. They'd still be poor and there'd still be a richest 1% and apple would have sold a lot more iphones.
You’ve got it completely backwards. At least for the US.
The top 1% in the US has 32% of the wealth. The next 9% has 37% of the wealth.
So basically the top 10% have 70% of the wealth and the bottom 90% have 30% of the wealth.
You can literally double the bottom 90%’s wealth by simply redistributing half the top 10%’a wealth. And the top 10% would continue to remain among the wealthiest human beings in the history of human civilization.
But if you were to redistribute all of the bottom 90%’s wealth, you wouldn’t make even a dent in anyone’s situation. And that’s even before we consider the massively declining marginal value of the dollar for a billionaire vs someone in the bottom 90% of the US economic system.
"I never understood the wealth redistribution argument from (USA) Americans. If you make $32,400 a year you are in the top 1% globally."
The math doesn't pencil out. Global population is approximately 7.4 billion.[1] One percent of 7.4 billion is 74 million. In cannot be the case that every member of the global one percent is American. But there are more than 70 million Americans that made money income of more than $47,000 in 2015.[2]
You're making the assumption that the bottom of the 1% and the top of the 1% have the same amount of wealth which is completely wrong. Nice superiority complex though. The $35k number is for the #70,000,000th wealthiest person.
According to your claim there would be 70 million millionaires in the world. Sanity check there?
If do some rough math, 1% of the world's population is 81 million. So at $44T, if you took that $44T and split it up equally, each person would have ~$550,000 USD.
Doesn't seem like such a big number any more. I'd bet many people on HN have more wealth than that.
Actually, I'd bet many people on HN are in the top 1% of wealth globally.
It's not even the "1%", it's the "1% of the 1%", Zuckerberg is great no doubt, but does he really deserve 2000X as much as a high level machine learning researcher?
The issue is that ~6-8 people in the world own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 40% of the world, that's not because of eight software engineers making $100K.
> the 0.00000001% of people who control now half the world's wealth
This is nonsense. Your source compares the wealth of the richest few people to the net worth of the "poorest" 50% of people. Net worth takes into account debt, and it happens that the half of the population with the lowest net worth has a total amount of debt about equal to its total amount of assets, so its total net worth is almost zero. A little more credit card spending, and an eight year old with a nickel in his pocket will have "more wealth than the poorest half". Needless to say this is not anything like half of the world's wealth. The total wealth of individuals is (according to my quick Google search) something like $250 trillion, and that presumably doesn't take into account wealth held by governments.
It's also silly to use net worth to identify the "poorest". Supposedly Donald Trump had a net worth in 1990 of negative 900 million. Your source's calculation would presumably call him the "poorest" person in the world and his presence would subtract $900 million from the wealth of the "poorest half". Is that sensible?
The richest people are very, very rich compared to most individuals. But no individual has much compared to the wealth of the whole world, and I suspect the share is shrinking. In the 19th century JP Morgan bailed out the US government, rather than the other way around!
A more interesting analysis would be to look at the distribution of total lifetime consumption.
> In fact, the top 1% paid 24.3% of all income tax. And the top 5% paid 40.6% of all income tax.
Those numbers aren't normalized btw. Americans in the top 1% net worth account for more than 30% of the total net worth of all Americans [1] [2]. 30% > 24.3% so it is slightly regressive from that standpoint.
But there's a bigger picture and that is, what do these rich people do with their money? Does it help people or not? Arguably Jeff Bezos hurts many people's lives (eliminating mom and pop stores, mistreating employees, etc.) while Elon Musk is probably overall helping people (space exploration, more transportation options).
My point is, all the Americans in the bottom X% have to provide something of value to others to maintain / increase their net worth. Many people (not all) at the top Y% are maintaining / increasing their net worth by pushing many people far below them slightly down.
Look closer at that data. Both the 62 richest people in the world and the 3.6bn poorest own a tiny tiny fraction of the world's wealth.
All you're really doing here is observing that the 3.6bn poorest people are really poor.
This does not support your statement that "the 1%" owns more than the rest of the world.
However, that statement happens to be true. If you look at the Credit Suisse wealth report that those oxfam figures are cherry picked from, you'll find that the 1% (globally) comprises about half the population of the US.
I'm just looking at what the bottom half of the population gets. There's on average $1600 per person available. And that's apparently also what the average person in the bottom half already has, since together they apparently own as much as these three billionaires.
So that means if you completely equalize the wealth of the bottom 50% of the population after redistributing the wealth of these billionaires, the average person in that bottom half will still only have $3200.
So maybe they can get their car fixed, but they still can't send their kids to college.
This is pretty disingenuous and I'll explain why. The next 1% after the top 1% owns a pretty sizable chunk too. And the next 1% after that a large chunk, and so on.
The top 10% has 75% of U.S. wealth, the top 20% has 87% of U.S. wealth. So carrying on about the 99% as if wealth is distributed in anyway evenly within that group is more than a bit silly. Especially when you look at the bottom 50% having a pittance, somewhere between 1-2% of U.S. wealth.
The next natural group after discussing the 1%'s wealth, isn't the other 99% just because 100-1=99...
So really your argument falls apart for me because most of the 99%, the bottom 70%, end up owning just about 1% of the world's wealth. And that's a fairly small slice of pie to be split between 227 million people. And before you show me the math that it's actually quite a bit per person. Don't forget that in reality the bottom 60% only has almost as much wealth as the whole next 10% and that most of the population isn't seeing the wealth you're describing.
even if you took the top 10 richest people in the world and gave it to every person in just america, thats only about 1600$/person. They'd still be poor and there'd still be a richest 1% and apple would have sold a lot more iphones.
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