1. People with so much money that they have enough to save thousands of people from starving to death, or dieing from prevantable diseases etc. etc. without ever noticing the difference to their wellbeing.
2. The fetishisation of people who give an irrelevant amount of their wealth away.
There are literally people alive today who won't be in a week or more because they don't have enough money, and these people could save them and they would never notice. All the difference to them would be the tiny change in a number on a balance sheet.
The simple fact is that a tiny fraction of our population can create a lot more wealth than the rest of them doing all the busywork they could possibly do, and this is only going to get worse as automation continues to increase. We need to rethink the idea that you need to contribute to eat because it simply isn't true anymore. Now, we can either start giving people what they need to live because they're humans and shouldn't be left to freeze to death, or we can roll tanks on the neighborhoods with the most have nots and keep up the crime, keep the property values low, and generally treat people like crap. I give it 50/50 either way at this point because so many people are so married to this idea that the only way you should be kept alive is if you're a benefit to someone else and I'm sorry, but in the wealthiest nations on the planet with celebrities and CEO's raking in billions, you'd think we could manage to find some cash somewhere to keep people alive if for no other reason than we CAN do it.
There is a seriously fundamental problem with modern humanity. It's not just about money/wealth, but in this example it's an easy example to talk about.
What exactly does one do with a billion dollars? Or 10 billion? Or 100 billion? If a global financial disaster strikes (no evil tax man, just some giant catastrophy), what does losing half of 100 billion dollars actually mean to someone?
Imagine for a moment that you could eat the finest food every day, without fail. Whatever you wanted would always be available. Would you be satisfied with stuffing yourself, or would you need to have 10 or 100 tables around you decorated with every possible other food you might want, but unfortunately do not have the space to consume?
If the poor people outside asked, "Can you please share?", would you say, "No, I earned all this! It is mine, and anyone who wants to take it from me is (choose your negative title)!"
Many of us here have played video games. In gaming, there are always people who are either really talented, really motivated/disciplined, or cheaters. They can far surpass the normal player in various measures. But for what gain? After the thrill of being best at one thing, or being richest wears off, what then? (Ok, yes, politics. But that's beside the point.)
I would rather be loved and appreciated by everyone around me than admired by throngs of poor people outside the walls of my castle. I suspect some of the people who chase and fight to hold riches have missed something important in early childhood and are doing the only thing they know to do to try to meet that need.
Is watching those around you starve/freeze to death due to having $0 (or less!) not a reason to care about whether some people make more than $15M? How many people could that hoarded wealth have housed and clothed and fed?
One of my concerns is that modern peoples are already very out of touch with what matters for the creation of things of real value. We already have bizarre ideas that money = value. We already have people who fail to understand the real world underpinnings of the creation of value -- of how you need certain resources and preconditions to have any hope of creating value. We already have too many people who think you fix financial problems, like depression, by manipulating the market economy. We already have a great many people who are intelligent, educated and well-paid who are very out of touch with reality in terms of where food and other important resources come from.
The reason it matters to me to have people get money by participating in the economy and not just for existing is because that participation shapes their ideas about what matters. There is no upper limit to what humans can spend or consume. We see this again and again and again. And about 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt within 5 years. People who have no education in dealing with wealth just run through it. Their lottery winnings seem "limitless" to them and they just run through it all and end up bankrupt.
You are talking about doing that as a universal thing. You are talking about spreading the belief that we have so much wealth right now that every last person can just consume and not produce and it will somehow be okay.
I very strongly disagree with this notion. It is not that it simply disincentives work. It is that it further poisons the minds of people who already are out of touch with where real value comes from. I find this incredibly scary stuff.
You have to deal with the mental space of humans, not just their bodily needs. You talk about distributing enough money to keep people fed and what not at some basic level and you ignore what that does to their minds and self concept. I think this is extremely dangerous territory and will be disastrous.
This is rare on the Internet nowadays, but I totally agree with everything you say. I often annoy economists by pointing out that due to the diminishing marginal utility of money any transfer of money from the rich to the poor increases overall utility. They don't like that at all. :)
I think focusing on the trust fund kid worth 200 million is also a red herring though. The focus should be on consumption inequality, not total amount of wealth. If someone is just sitting on a lot of cash then they're not hurting anyone, but if they're outspending everyone else then they are (in a sense) hurting them.
Without wanting to sound contrarian, the mere fact that individuals have been able to amass hundreds of billions of dollars seems to indicate that as a tool of exchange, money has failed.
These hundreds of billions aren’t helping anyone on the planet find shelter, food, or improve anyone’s quality of life. It’s being used to further the wealth of the already incredibly wealthy. Not to mention, the fact that the CEOs of these companies have hundreds of billions when their employees may only be earning thousands suggests that they are contributing hundreds of thousands of times the effort or value, which can simply not be the case.
In any case, the current system has served me well as i possess knowledge that is deemed valuable at present, but i personally know dozens of people who through a variety of causes haven’t been able to extract the same, and who would benefit from a complete rethinking of the system. This again suggests that for the maximum benefit to the most people, something needs to change.
The core of the disagreement seems to be the view that I'm not wealthy, yet I'm sure there are many who would trade parts of their life to have what I have. I can't save millions, but that excuse me from not saving the dozens I could've?
Keeping the money isn't necessary as unphilanthropic as you seem to imply.
Wealth doesn't typically sit under the mattress doing nothing. While the person is alive, they can control how that wealth is invested, and do good that way. Giving it away while still alive would take it out of their control, and perhaps they think that keeping control will do better from a philanthropic perspective.
Saving everyone isn't even a consideration. Saving the wealthy's profits is, and we can't save all the wealthy people's profits, so we prioritize the richest's
Complaints about saving are the most absurd thing ever.
Rich people were getting free money by doing nothing and taking no risk. Now they're getting less free money by doing nothing and taking no risk.
It's crazy that you want to enact policies which would very literally kill thousands of people just because you want rich people (who don't need more money) to get more free unearned money.
In a truly free market wealthy people would have to pay vault, security, and insurance fees to maintain a riskless balance.
It really does not matter how much you have. You are hoarding wealth that you could be giving back to improve conditions for those that aren’t as fortune to be able to save. It doesn’t feel great to listen to people tell you what to do with your money, does it?
Honestly once you have so much money that you can no longer spend it all, any extra immediately goes into making you even richer. You eventually are able to sustain your luxurious life just from interest and investment returns, potentially requiring 0 work from you. There's no reason we should be accepting this when people are starving and homeless.
A better question is why the world is letting a tiny handful of people hoard unimaginable wealth while millions starve, die of preventable disease, or live in misery.
Because if this people gave away this money, the effect on the very poor might be noticeable for some months but not sustainable. In no time they would be very poor again and the ones that gave the money away would be unable to give more.
Paul Graham has an essay about this error, how people thinks that there's a fixed amount of money. Once you understand that wealth is created and how, you can't talk like that with a straight face.
Personally I haven't been able to muster empathy for people who amassed a thousand lifetimes' worth of personal wealth and then are suddenly threatened with the potential of being left with...only a few hundred lifetimes' worth.
Given the state of our societies, I think we are in desperate need of some wealth-bashing.
With our technology, nearly nobody should need to live without health-care or in poverty. But so many do. And what is even more alarming: So many people do in the rich countries.
How is this justified by the thesis that the wealth of some people make the others richer too.
It is a myth of capitalism. That's it.
What is left to the 99%: Charities of the wealthy people that earn more by just stupid investing than most of the others with good ideas or entrepreneurship can ever hope to make.
Also those here hoping to rise up to the top should know that -- it is a lottery game and most of us will simply not win. Do we really, really want a world, where the "Winners take it all" and the others have to fall?
1. People with so much money that they have enough to save thousands of people from starving to death, or dieing from prevantable diseases etc. etc. without ever noticing the difference to their wellbeing.
2. The fetishisation of people who give an irrelevant amount of their wealth away.
There are literally people alive today who won't be in a week or more because they don't have enough money, and these people could save them and they would never notice. All the difference to them would be the tiny change in a number on a balance sheet.
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