[danbruc]

One of the Oxfam reports [1] states »The 1,810 dollar billionaires on the 2016 Forbes list, 89% of whom are men, own $6.5 trillion – as much wealth as the bottom 70% of humanity«. Let's assume they accumulated all this wealth in just 10 years, how much better off could everyone have been if we evenly spread the money instead of putting it into the pockets of just 1,810 people? If we spread it across all 7.6 billion people over 10 years everyone would receive $85.25 per year or $7.12 per month or $0.23 per day.

So while the rich are really rich they are also very few and in consequence spreading the wealth among the many poor has a much smaller impact than many expect without doing the math. I am not saying that it would have no impact, it could probably lift the about 20% of the world population still living in extreme poverty - $1.90 or less per day - above the extreme poverty line if spread among them but it certainly wouldn't make everyone on Earth rich.

If you do the math for other scenarios, for example calculate how much better of all the employees of a company could be if the top executives would just receive average wages, you almost always get similar results. That still doesn't mean that I am okay with such situations, far from. I think more equality would be a good thing on its own even if the difference for most people would be relatively small.

[1] https://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/an-economy...

[pishpash]

There are many ways to spread it evenly. You can build infrastructure, or make loans and investments to capital-constrained communities, etc.

[petra]

Haven't Bill Gates shown what these kinds of money could buy for billions ? isn't it a fairer approach to judge such things ?

[danbruc]

They certainly helped to improve the situation of many but I am not sure that they managed to affect a billion people. And you can certainly do a lot of good with a couple of billion dollar but you can not make really many rich. And that was my main point, the wealth of the very top is not what makes the poor poor just due to an uneven wealth distribution.

[kthejoker2]

But we're not talking just a one time capital redistribution.

The idea is to reverse the flows of capital to improve the "natural" pyramid of distribution.

[danbruc]

I am not sure what you are suggesting. My point is that there is not really that much money to redistribute. To make it concrete, let's say you have a company with 10,000 employees making an annual profit of $1B before labor costs. In that case you could pay everyone $100,000 annually. Or you could take away 1% from everyone paying them only $99,000 and give yourself a nice $10,000,000 pay check every year. You are now 100 times better off than your employees but they individually just lost 1% each. So while being 1% better off might have some compounding effects in the long run this hopefully illustrates that there is often not really that much wealth at the very top if you see it in relation to the large number of people you want to redistribute it to.