As both global economic growth and inflation continue the fraction of the world's inhabitants with more than the arbitrary $1,000,000 cutoff will continue to grow. Not that net worth is always the best measure of wellbeing, the person with the least net worth in the world is an American with billions in debt despite his several mansions and I don't think he's worse off than I am.
The only thing I'm getting out of this is that the average person who saves modestly and invests can accumulate significantly more than a million bucks in a normal working career. None of which is relevant to my original point of the worthlessness of this particular metric.
No. Inflation has been near 0 for most of the western world since 2008. The increase is a result of lax monetary policy ( central banks flooding the world with money ) and asset price ( stocks, housing ) increases.
In other words, inflation hasn't increase 10.6% last year.
Inflation has been low, but regardless that just means money is worth less, it doesn't make you a millionaire (unless you owned a Bay Area home!). In any event, the dollar has actually been quite strong.
Given the aging demographic trend over most of the world, both the number of and wealth of millionaires should be increasing.
What most people (and this article) tend to ignore is that a 65 year old should be richer than a 25 year old. 40 years of good savings discipline will lead to a nice number. Maybe not a million, but a large sum regardless.
Instead, this article wants to focus on the ultra-high net worth (although the article uses a $30 million cutoff instead of the usual $40 million). In the end, you have an article that is more likely to divde people than get people to say say, "wow, those older folks sure did a good job savings - I should do that so I can be like them." Instead we get the opposite.
Wealth concentration of this magnitude seems like an extremely inefficient allocation of capital. Dollars get things done and having them concentrated and controlled in a just a few spots seems like the worst way to apply their value. A person of this level of wealth has no problem using the wealth simply for personal gain.
The concentration of wealth seems to undermine democracy.
Democracy seems to be working out decently well, concentration of wealth seems to run counter to democratic ideals. I guess that's how it has always been in capitalism: undemocractically-selected application of larger amounts of capital.
For instance, if one of these wealthy people decides to spend on a $1BB on PR campaign to run for office and they win; they will have effectively bought the outcome of the election like any other off-the-shelf product.
This level of wealth inequality could be a national security risk.
If the level of wealth concentration gets too high, we could start seeing a new market of privately-owned paramilitary sharing the space with what was originally occupied by branches of the military.
Sure enough, out of the woodwork comes the Marxist brigade, ready to pounce on anything that does not privilege the good of the group over that of the individual.
It's an irreconcilable difference that lives at the very heart of an individual's soul and that no amount of intelligent discourse can tackle.
You're either putting the individual first and the other side immediately and without a second thought classifies you as an arseh*le, or putting society above the individual and the other side immediately sees you as a sheep that has surrendered everything that makes humans interesting, who willingly chooses to be an ant, trading his pride and individuality for the safe and warm meekness of being protected by the group.
There are certainly public/tax policy sets that could serve both: to help and/or protect those who don't have the opportunity or ability to become an Ayn Rand hero, but also still allow for those that choose to fight down that path. Yes that means that the richer one becomes, the less they take home as a percentage of their gross (more so than current tax policy requires). But it means that there are more than two extremes to the issue.
Or maybe instead there are a huge number of views somewhere in the middle. Like, maybe a stable society is one that both rewards individual achievement while trying to maintain a level playing field and providing a basic level of support for everybody in society.
I don’t recognise your mischaracterisation and this sort of thinking is why we are presently so completely fucked.
The Marxist brigade? Even a pro capitalist should be against increasing wealth inequality.
A healthy market has plenty of competition and competition reduces profits. If the vast majority of wealth gets concentrated into relatively few people then that indicates a lack of competition and leads to inefficiencies.
Every billionaire or mega corp is a market failure
Meh it has a few bugs, definitely currently on an unstable build, but it's a huge enterprise system with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and technical debt but it's still running though after almost 200+ years.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 90.9 ms ] threadThat becomes closer to something like 33 years, which nudges close to the boundaries of most people's entire working life.
edit: national average wage index for 2016 was 48,642, so I guess for a working individual thats about 20 years then.
So when the bubble bursts, their wealth will come surging right back down.
In other words, inflation hasn't increase 10.6% last year.
If you want to check historical inflation data.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
What most people (and this article) tend to ignore is that a 65 year old should be richer than a 25 year old. 40 years of good savings discipline will lead to a nice number. Maybe not a million, but a large sum regardless.
Instead, this article wants to focus on the ultra-high net worth (although the article uses a $30 million cutoff instead of the usual $40 million). In the end, you have an article that is more likely to divde people than get people to say say, "wow, those older folks sure did a good job savings - I should do that so I can be like them." Instead we get the opposite.
Much of HN likely lives in a similar bubble.
because young people have less money, less opportunity to get money, and the expensive things are far more expensive.
The concentration of wealth seems to undermine democracy.
Democracy seems to be working out decently well, concentration of wealth seems to run counter to democratic ideals. I guess that's how it has always been in capitalism: undemocractically-selected application of larger amounts of capital.
For instance, if one of these wealthy people decides to spend on a $1BB on PR campaign to run for office and they win; they will have effectively bought the outcome of the election like any other off-the-shelf product.
This level of wealth inequality could be a national security risk.
If the level of wealth concentration gets too high, we could start seeing a new market of privately-owned paramilitary sharing the space with what was originally occupied by branches of the military.
It's an irreconcilable difference that lives at the very heart of an individual's soul and that no amount of intelligent discourse can tackle.
You're either putting the individual first and the other side immediately and without a second thought classifies you as an arseh*le, or putting society above the individual and the other side immediately sees you as a sheep that has surrendered everything that makes humans interesting, who willingly chooses to be an ant, trading his pride and individuality for the safe and warm meekness of being protected by the group.
Pick your camp. I know which side I'm on.
I don’t recognise your mischaracterisation and this sort of thinking is why we are presently so completely fucked.
A healthy market has plenty of competition and competition reduces profits. If the vast majority of wealth gets concentrated into relatively few people then that indicates a lack of competition and leads to inefficiencies.
Every billionaire or mega corp is a market failure
It's the natural state for the bigger entities to devour the smaller weaker ones and grow.
Doesn't seem to be working particularly well in the US.
Can we please go back to talking about tech so that the deep leftist bias of the HN crowd can at least go unnoticed for a while ?