I would replace "own" with "control". They don't hoard production facilities and buildings in their locked cellar. The things they own are still being used to produce stuff consumed by other people than the owner.
No, but they control the economy. They decide what projects to start, and since they are so rich they only think in hundreds of millions at least. So we get less local control - which are all small projects - and more mega-projects/corporations. Which are better at producing at scale, but are (much) worse at providing a satisfying work environment. So we end up producing more than enough stuff, but much of it not actually needed - here you need clever marketing to convince people to consume stuff they don't need, from drugs to insurance to a new shiny car.
I think much of the discussion and the picture a lot of people have in their heads about "the 0.1%" is Scrooge McDuck, with all the money right there only for himself to even see. But in reality capitalist ownership is more a matter of control of what, where, how.
Apart from the means of production, the "body" of the economy, they also control a large share of the "blood" of the economy, the money. Wherever that flow is directed things grow, where it doesn't go lights go out.
While the rest of the population still has quite a bit of money taken together, there is another problem of psychology: Money is no problem for a rich capitalist. They can easily finance billions. But for the people who don't have such easy access to the streams of finance money is much more static, money is much more valuable for the majority of people. Also, "credit" has different meanings for someone investing in a small venture and a billionaire: The latter has financial instruments so that he ends up carrying little to none of the risk.
Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but it isn't quite so black and white.
6 men owning as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the planet doesn't actually mean much while ever they aren't keeping their money under the bed away from everyone else - it's still in distribution.
They still go to sleep at night, get up in a morning, have a shower and grab a cup of coffee then go to the bathroom, eat dinner, watch a movie and go to bed I would imagine.
The wealth that they have is an illusion even for themselves.
Now on the other hand, that six individuals have the power to control how their money is distributed is a very real problem, but the wealth itself isn't.
I haven't really been a fan of macroeconomics since the nineties when the whole thing was proved to be an illusion and then confirmed yet again in 2008.
> on the other hand, that six individuals have the power to control how their money is distributed is a very real problem, but the wealth itself isn't.
I wouldn't say the wealth is the problem, but wealth inequality is. Our current system allows for a few people to make millions of dollars a day while others can't even get jobs or afford a house. A certain amount of inequality is required to incentivize high performers to create more, but the current amount of inequality is obscene.
From a humanist angle, those buildings are outrageous monstrosities and monuments to human egos. However, they were built from wealth generation that probably gave farmers in paddy fields the opportunity to be elevated out of relative poverty to positions where they could gain an education and likely some are now right here with us on HN.
Likely it was all paid for by your average WalMart / Apple / Amazon shopper.
A deeper question is if we feel this is money well spent, and skyscrapers as legacies certainly didn't start in China and are quite prevalent in the West as well.
Taxing the hell out of frivolous luxury goods might be a jolly good start but dunno if that's going to fly anytime soon because even that is a subjective call at best.
China has been aggressively industrializing since the 70's and their work is paying off, while America has been aggressively deindustrializing, shipping all the work overseas, gutting the middle class, all so the upper class can benefit from the cheaper labor. The global economy means nothing to me when I can't get a job.
If globalization doesn't help everyone of a country, it will lead to widespread disdain for globalization and eventually the reversal of the policies. If globalization is so important to create a more prosperous world, then we need to find a more sustainable way of doing it.
"The global economy means nothing to me when I can't get a job."
Yeah I'll buy that, but the global economy is what gave you the computer that you are using to type that message on and it makes your groceries cheaper when you go to QFC.
We certainly do need to find a better way of doing it, because we can't all be big data scientists, drone operators and bartenders. Thumbs up to that
I'm arguing that inequality at the moment is obscene. Here[1][2][3][4] are some sources backing up my claim.
Basically, inequality is massive and accelerating. It's hurting the lower and middle classes to the point that small business creation is slowing down a lot[5]. Seeing how a lot of people are employed in small businesses(49% of private sector workforce[6]), it's acting as a real drag on our economy, keeping wages down and making inequality even higher.
There is no doubt that there is inequality and that inequality is accelerating, especially in the US and West.
What's the global picture look like? I mean we do want our fellow humans to do well too, right?
Maybe not spending so many $$$ on things that go boom might be a good start and instead bomb places with broadband connections, social media, las-vegas strip clubs and NetFlix.
At least that would generate US jobs and still be educational and to all our benefits to some degree.
For anyone else looking into this, it's pretty hard to tell from this post how many people the source (Credit Suisse) estimates have negative net worth. Looking at this article https://www.credit-suisse.com/us/en/about-us/research/resear... they estimate that "an estimated 9 percent of adults globally are net debtors". Together with their claim "we disregard the relatively small amount of wealth owned by children on their own account, and frame our results in terms of the global adult population, which totaled 4.8 billion in 2016", that's ~425 million adults with net debt.
It's hard to determine for which p Credit Suisse believes that the poorest p proportion people/adults have zero net worth. I tried to compute the implications of these claims (from the full PDF form of the report linked to above): "According to our estimates, half of all adults in the world own less than USD 2,222, and the bottom 20% of adults own no more than USD 248. The average wealth of people in these slices of the distribution is correspondingly low: just USD 159 for the bottom 50% and minus USD 1,079 for the bottom 20%." I believe these claims imply 42% <= p <= 46.5% or so.
All in all, that means that they estimate the poorest 2 billion adults have combined zero net worth (in fact, slightly negative). If you combine that with their estimate of 2.7 billion children of "relatively small .. wealth", that's about 4.7 billion people with approximate combined zero net worth. It's unclear how to properly account for children (maybe you shouldn't!), but you can easily decrease the number of adults to compensate. I think it's safe to say that (the people behind) this Credit Suisse report believe that the poorest 4.5 billion people in the world have combined nonpositive net worth.
(Note that the "people" numbers are higher than Oxfam's because they include children. Oxfam's "3.5 billion poorest people" is a reference to half of the world's population, even though Credit Suisse was talking about half of the world's adult population.)
You can't eat money though. If they (the 6 most wealthy people) cashed in all their stock and re-distributed their wealth as best they could, the value of money would plummet since so much more is in circulation. It would crash the global economy and cause even more poverty.
Huh, it's already in distribution. Presumably those shares are held by institutions who use those for investments in projects.
That only the few can control which projects are invested in and compounded by [lack of] any semblance of "altruistic transparency" is the main concern not the wealth itself.
Inflation occurs when the US government adds around $10 billion of money to the market every year though (they print money to replace existing / lost currency, but always over produce). The money gets "consumed" but the value of each dollar goes down. And that's just with $10 billion.
That point aside, my original point was that just because the 6 richest people have paper value of more than half the planet doesn't mean there are enough resources to keep everyone alive just because they are born. (which is ideal in a theoretical world obviously)
> Inflation occurs when the US government adds around $10 billion of money to the market every year though (they print money to replace existing / lost currency, but always over produce). The money gets "consumed" but the value of each dollar goes down.
That's wrong. Inflation is more complicated than that. If it were that simple, Japan would not have had the years of sustained deflation.
The hundreds of billions in deficit spending and easy money at the Fed have a much greater impact on inflation than the amount of cash in circulation (if the nominal size of the economy grows, you'd expect to need more cash...).
