[bitcharmer]

This comment reads as either trolling or a very naive take but I'll bite.

Why obscene wealth is a problem? Even my 10yo knows that. Extreme asymmetry and inequality. From different treatment by the government, to the justice system, to access to health care, education to getting in a position where being rich means you can exploit poor people to get richer with zero consequences.

How this has to be explained to someone on this forum is beyond me, but here we are.

[Kon5ole]

>From different treatment by the government, to the justice system, to access to health care, education to getting in a position where being rich means you can exploit poor people to get richer with zero consequences

All the things you mention are problems that need solving, but they are wrong in themselves separated from the wealth. A wealthy person might not be doing any of those things.

Wealth in a free capitalist society is generally the result of increased economic activity which often benefits many more than the billionaires that appear as side effects. This is a good thing which should be kept, but we need to ensure that society isn't corrupted in the process.

We used to have much more extreme divisions of wealth than we do now, kings and nobility a few hundred years ago, and we made laws to limit their influence. So it can be done.

[bitcharmer]

> We used to have much more extreme divisions of wealth than we do now, kings and nobility a few hundred years ago, and we made laws to limit their influence. So it can be done.

I think your comment is optimistic to the point of being naive. Wealth disparity has been increasing in the last 200 years.

https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in...

[Kon5ole]

>I think your comment is optimistic to the point of being naive. Wealth disparity has been increasing in the last 200 years.

You mention disparity as if it is a problem but ignore that most of the population is much better off. Your source clearly shows that in 1800 the world population was mostly poor, while in 2015 it was mostly _not_ poor. This despite the population being 7x larger.

Which is exactly my point - the system that generates billionaires has done so as a side effect of generating enough wealth to lift a several times larger world population above the poverty line.

Is disparity itself so offensive that we should let everyone be poor just to avoid billionaires? I can't get behind that, but I do want better laws to prevent corruption.

[bitcharmer]

It's a bit like saying: oh look, everything's going better now because fewer people die from pneumonia now than a hundred years ago. You're missing the bigger picture. An average young person is now much less likely to afford housing than the generation before them and even less likely then their grandparents.

What does that mean to you?

[Kon5ole]

>everything's going better now because fewer people die from pneumonia now than a hundred years ago. You're missing the bigger picture.

I'm not talking about pneumonia though, and surely the bigger picture is that the average person in the world is better off today than they were before?

I think the mechanism that caused that has billionaires as a side effect, which is hard to eliminate without also eliminating the thing that makes everyone better off.

>An average young person is now much less likely to afford housing than the generation before them and even less likely then their grandparents. What does that mean to you?

To me it means that the housing markets in many countries are poorly regulated and speculation fueled by low interest rates have inflated prices.