Submitted 8 months ago by seeCseas@lemmy.world to workreform@lemmy.world
Surprise, surprise!
I mean, yeah. Most people don't even come close to that when adding up everything they earn in a lifetime. So to get a billion before 30, where more than half of your life was in school and growing up. Not much to generate wealth for investments. Building companies takes time and money too and you're not going to be a billionaire from working enough regular jobs.
I wonder where all that wealth would go if they suddenly died from accidents, and any potential heirs or next of kin also died.
It would literally vanish. Wealth is not cash. If Amazon disappeared one day, not a single person’s (poor or not) bank account would get bigger as a result.
Let’s give it a try
Only one way to find out.
Someone in another thread said something that resonated in me. Helps show how big a billion is…
One million seconds is a bit more that 11 days, One billion seconds is over 31 YEARS !
TIL: Everyone who has been alive less than 1 Billion Seconds and has over 1 Billion Dollars needs to be eaten, and their wealth forcibly distributed.
You didn’t earn a dollar a second, 3600 dollars an hour, starting the second you were born?
And the top 5 have over a trillion dollars combined. Wealth hoarding is likely one of the worst human traits to have.
Yeah, this is meaningless though.
Net worths are guessed (you literally can’t perfectly accurately audit total net worth in any practical way) price tags. When it comes to individual assets like stocks, that price tag is dictated by the market (basically, everyone other than the owner) that essentially assert “if you sold this, I’d be willing to pay $X to buy it from you”.
A price tag is not cash. An asset becoming more valuable is not equivalent to the mint printing bills. And owning shares in businesses that are actively involved in the economy is literally the opposite of “hoarding”.
The wealth gap between the very top and the destitute was MUCH smaller 100 years ago. But poverty was MUCH more common then, too. So then why do so many act like that gap widening is at fault for the poverty that still exists?
Whoa, big shock, the 15 (that’s the number of “billionaires under 30”, according to the article) youngest billionaires are the ones most likely to have reached that point via inheritance.
No shit?
This is not the gotcha you think it is.
What gotcha? You just summarized the article
Lol research. You coulda figured that shit out with a subscription to “Duh weekly”.
Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
The top 50 billionaires could pool 99% of their wealth without it changing their quality of life at all, and have enough money to quite literally solve most of the world’s problems. We’re talking trillions of dollars that could be put to use for good.
They don’t because that’s not how psychopaths work.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s true-ish from a strict finances perspective.
But consider the island of Haiti. We could “solve” the problem of chronic poverty on the island by simply showing up with boatloads of food and clothing and other consumer goods. But it would be a temporary fix, at best. A real investment - just on this tiny island - would mean large scale infrastructure improvements. And that takes an enormous amount of materials plus labor plus the logistics to move it all and assemble it.
What we’re describing isn’t strictly a monetary problem. Its an engineering - and, to a greater extent - economic organization problem. Showing up with bricks of cash would be less beneficial than dredging their harbors and building out new power plants and fixing all the damage done by the last big earthquake. And that latter bit requires real engineering, which requires education, which requires skilled professionals willing to bring Haitians in and train them in the work necessary to improve the island.
And while we probably could perform a project like this across Haiti, by employing the Billionaire Money + Excuse Unused Capacity of global industry, I question whether we could do it globally. Not without reorienting an enormous amount of our existing infrastructure towards these tasks.
When people talk about “market economy v command economy”, this is the kind of problem they’re really facing off against. Not just “how do we pay for food?” but “how do we organize the supply chain from the farms/fisheries to the dinner tables?”
We could “fix” Haiti’s problems with far less than we’re currently spending to control their population. But that would mean building large earthquake resilient housing, energy, and transport components. And those buildings would divert the labor supply from making cheap textiles and agricultural goods. And that would mean people who buy cheap from Haiti’s functionally-still-enslaved population wouldn’t get to 100x mark-up the end products when they were sold in the US at American retail rates.
That’s what we’re really discussing when we talk about “billionaire wealth” versus “solving the world’s problems”.
Do Haitians get to live for themselves? Or do they spend all their waking hours making life cheaper for other people?
UnpluggedFridge@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Connect your circle of thought. If we buy Haiti a bunch of food and deliver it, we have created the jobs and infrastructure to solve the issue precisely in the manner you describe. We have redirected the economy to solve the problem. You seem to take issue with the idea that the solution did not arise from capitalist market forces. Well no shit, that’s kind of why we have the problem.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 8 months ago
Show up with bricks of cash, and harbor-dredgers, electric generators, and construction companies will be racing each other to figure out how to get them from you.
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Billionaire -> max 9 billions Multiply by 50 that’s a maximum of 450 billion dollars.
Trillion not reached.
Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
YSK, the top five have over 150 billion to their name… each. The top guy has over 230 billion.
The top 50 combined have multiple trillions, and growing.
dream_weasel@iusearchlinux.fyi 8 months ago
… 10 billion dollars is still a billionaire. Or is this a comment that nobody has 10 billion dollars?
damnedfurry@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Most of the world’s major problems literally cannot be solved by an injection of funds alone.
I’m acutely reminded of when that guy said $6 billion would solve world hunger, Musk basically replied “prove how and I’ll give you the money right now”, and the response was a combination of impotent sputtering and backpedaling about how it would now help, but not solve.
Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
It’s about what that amount of money would go towards: education, healthcare, housing, food security, environmental protection, wildlife preservation, social programs, etc.
We can solve these problems with targeted funding that gets to the root of the problem. For example, rather than simply distributing food, you educate and equip communities with the ability to grow their own. Even low-cost water purification in some parts of the world can make a massive difference to literally millions of people.
Lifting people out of poverty, even by having a universal basic income, would solve a ton of issues facing those populations: low education, poor health, food security, programs for kids/teens, more equitable transportation, etc.
We’re not talking about sending off grands for a few thousand dollars or even several million. We would have TRILLIONS to use towards implementing solutions. And that money would continue to come, because these rich assholes collect and hoard money faster than anyone can spend it.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 months ago
npr.org/…/how-6-billion-from-elon-musk-could-feed…
Literally an NPR article on the subject, outlining how that sum could solve world hunger.
Then Musk claimed to have donated $5.7B several weeks later. However, this money was not directed to the WFP
So it looks like Musk was looking for a large tax write-off, not a cure-all for world hunger. And when he found a viable place to dump his money, he took it. This wasn’t about food aid at all. It was about Musk figuring out what he could buy for the price of a tax cut.
Nosavingthrow@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m not here to simp for billionaires, but, how could you expect them to be competant ebough to do the organizing required to spend the money in am effective way as to solve all the worlds problems. Like, really break down what you’re asking. Do you think the softest people on the planet have what it takes? The governments of the world need to step up, sieze these assets, and use them to solve the problems of the world, not John Dipshits, grandson of billionaire.
Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I don’t expect them to.
Yes, a global, unified governmental body who’s sole purpose is to better life on this planet, would be a good start. Give them a trillion dollars and see how dramatically better our existence can become.
Really, another way of putting is that if wealth was distributed more effectively (i.e. no such thing as billionaires and nobody is poor), then everyone would have a common goal to keep things balanced, lest they lose it all to a handful of rich guys.