This is misleading. It counts debt as negative. This means a person who has zero wealth and zero debt will have more wealth than bottom 5% of people cumulatively (their wealth cancels out due to debt).
It would be misleading to suggest that a single person with zero wealth has more wealth than 100k people’s wealth combined. But that’s what this headline and report are doing.
>It would be misleading to suggest that a single person with zero wealth has more wealth than 100k people’s wealth combined.
It wouldn't be misleading. You may have to explain it to somebody who has absolutely no understanding of how finance works, but that doesn't make the statement misleading.
It doesn't even make sense. I think you meant to say "efficiently" perhaps but even arguing that is an uphill battle - at most you could say that is true for some types of projects.
FTA: The authoritative World Inequality Report 2026, based on data compiled by 200 researchers, also found that the top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90% combined, while the poorest half captures less than 10% of total global earnings.
The report puts the threshold for being in the top 10% of income earners at €65.5K. I suspect many HN users would fall into this category.
Related: is there a way to estimate what the wealth inequality was like pre-industrial revolution? It occured to me that in an era of kings, queens, aristocrats, and nobles it might be similar to what we see today. Without concluding whether it is right or wrong, would it have been very different for the bottom 90% in terms of inequality? Is it just the ‘who’ that makes up the very top of the wealth and income charts that is different?
I think a very problematic aspect of this is self-perception.
People that see (growing) wealth inequality as a problem rarely perceive themselves as part of it, but e.g. anyone complaining about the "top 1%" on this forum is pretty likely to be part of the "problem" themselves, globally speaking.
I think that for a lot of issues "people richer than us" are mostly a convenient scapegoat to shift the blame upstream, e.g. with CO2 emissions: If you're an average "western" citizen, then you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability, and pointing at celebrities and their private jets or somesuch is no better than thinly veiled whataboutism in my view.
I did some quick math: the top .001% consumes as much as bottom 3% of Americans cumulatively. It’s high but it gives an accurate picture of how bad the real problem is.
How would you call them differently? The amount of power that wealth gives them over "us" is unfathomable.
We often contemplate history with lofty detachment, thinking how far we have come as humans and societies. Kings and queens seen as ancient fictions. Sure some KPIs like life expectancy/comfort improved thanks to technologies and progress. I don't deny all that, but that's not my point. The extreme majority of humans are still vessels/subjects to an absurd minority of other humans. How can't we see that as a failure?
Rich people having too much wealth is not necessarily that bad a thing because most of the investment is in productive companies.
It’s not like they are using their wealth on frivolous consumption. Which means redistribution would only change who controls the investment and not the actual consumption patterns of people. Implication is that poor people will consume the same as before after redistribution with perhaps some extra assets.
So nothing materially changes other than some security. Poor people will continue to consume the same as before.
Bigger problem is it’s not so clear that redistribution is necessarily a good thing because I feel the people who made money are more likely to make better decisions on their own companies.
I don’t know how companies would fare if for example Amazon were redistributed and run like some public company.
Frivolous consumption would be a better thing than dumping more money into “productive companies.” Apple becomes a trillion dollar company and did that uplift the world at all? Not really. People at the top got rich. What is there to show for it but ewaste. Slave labor. Lithium mining. Data center pollution. A race to what, I’m not sure. They will spend it on lockheed stock to diversify. Missiles with swords. Bombs. Dead people. Wars to justify more bomb production. Arms races that amounts to lighting money on fire because wwiii will never happen since everyone is so globally overleveraged. Diversify into oil. More pollution. Human rights abuses. The worst leaders in the modern age rich beyond wildest imagination free to slaughter journalists and have the world look the other way after a few months of wagging a finger.
At least when they blow their money on some iberico ham a farmer somewhere keeps his livelihood. An expensive cocktail and a 200 year old distillery keeps its doors open. $100 tip on valet directly into the local economy. Live in housekeeper providing for their children.
Productivity is a cult. Why are the most “productive” things the most dehumanizing? What are the true great works of this world? Most reasonable people would say trying to help the poor, cure disease, save the environment. All things private investment has deemed insufficiently productive over some machiavellian horror.
I would not care at all if 1 ppm of the world population would hold 100 times the wealth of the poorest half of the world population, if all of the poorest half would have nonetheless the means to produce their minimum necessities in energy, food, clothes etc., independently of others, so that their survival for the next months or weeks or even days would not be completely dependent on the benevolence of the rich to create places where they must be employed in order to be able to survive.
A half of century ago, my grandparents were still relatively independent of the rest of the world, because they owned a house and some cultivated land, so even if their normal sources of revenue would have disappeared by becoming jobless, they could have still lived quite decently being sustained only by what they were producing in their garden and by their animals. They also did not depend on external services for things like water supply, garbage disposal or heating. They used electricity, but they had plenty of space so that today one could have used there enough solar panels to be also independent of external energy sources.
On the other hand, now I am living in a big city and I absolutely need a salary if I want to continue to live. Where I live there are no salaries for an engineer or programmer that are big enough so that one could ever buy a place like that owned by my grandparents.
I do not believe that this extreme dependency between employees and employers that has become more and more widespread during the last century will lead to anything good.
There are a lot of important technical problems that must be solved in order to ensure the survival of humanity, but the research to solve them is almost non-existent, because those who control the money are too short-sighted so they invest only according to various fads in research that will produce things of negligible benefit for most humans. The unsolved problems that have accumulated are such that only an effort of the kind that happened in the research done during World War II would solve them, but it seems unlikely that something like that will ever repeat.
I don't think it's self-sufficiency that should be the goal for society here, but self-sufficiency is one of several means to achieve the goal.
I think the goal should be for everybody to have the ability to walk away from an abusive boss, landlord or spouse without jeopardizing their life essentials. Which is a stronger statement than just saying that everybody should be able to afford their life essentials.
Not having a boss or landlord is a great way of achieving this, but it's not the only way. (If you don't have a boss, you do need the freedom to turn away abusive clients or customers)
Another way is ensuring that the essentials are universally available. Universal health care, public housing and a SNAP program that's not itself abusive is another.
Another HN-popular mechanism is UBI.
Another mechanism that helps greatly is ensuring that the essentials are inexpensive. Clothing and food have become cheap, but healthcare and housing have more than absorbed the difference.
Well, money is power, so wealth inequality is power inequality. Those 100x wealthy people will have 100x (or more) the power, and people with power like that like to do bad things to those that don't have it.
See, it isn't about having stuff, it is about having power over people. That's why inequality is horrible.
You can still recreate that life right now if you want, but people are choosing not to (I also choose not to so I'm not saying it's some requirement to do so).
You can get a piece of land and have a simple house on it, get a wood stove, stop buying things that generate trash (grow your own food, etc. and compost all scraps). Raise animals like chickens and goats. Put in a well. There's a ton of guides and YouTube videos out there about people who homestead.
I know people who do this on 1-2 acres and are a couple hours from a major city. The reality is that it's a ton of work and there's downsides, it depends on what kind of person you are.
(This is responding to your specific comment, I know that choosing to do this in the developed world is different from people who have no choice and no options in a developing country/place).
I think also we cannot measure wealth in GDP or even by salary. Someone who earns $2k e.g. in vietnam and lives in Danang will have better quality of life than someone who earns $4k and lives in SF.
> a report that argues global inequality has reached such extremes that urgent action has become essential.
This is always stated like if that was an obvious fact that somehow "action is needed" against the richest, but is it?
Does it matter that a few individuals are multi-billionaires (usually because of the notional value of shares they own)? I would say that it does not. What matters is how the majority and the poorest are faring, which is orthogonal.
Focusing on reducing economic inequality is silly.
Some people being wealth doesn't mean other people must be poor.
Society has never been as rich as now, and people are getting out of misery faster and faster.
Drawing attention to the fact that some outliers have an insane amount of wealth has been shadowing the real problem: politics is in getting in the way of eradicating poverty.
Many people, mostly fueled by envy, misses that and instead focus on asking for taxing the wealthiest rather than noticing that poor people lives could be vastly improved by reducing taxation on them (rather than increasing the taxation of richer people, which is a silly take on the matter), removing economic barriers created by political forces, etc.
I think it's become popular to talk about the issue of accumulation of wealth, and make this kind of dramatic wealth comparison to point out how uneven the distribution is. I wish wealth wasn't treated so abstractly as if it's some kind of universal measure of evil. I would like to learn about some specific cases of hyper wealthy people and what they are actually up to. Seems like some very rich people do really useful things with their money. Couple other thoughts that hang around my head:
- Though the bottom half of humanity may be poor, on average they have a quality of life that has risen dramatically over the past century thanks in large part to the deployment of technologies and aid originating from the wealthier nations.
- Historically the only time the trend of wealth accumulation reverses is during massive crises, wars, and civilizational collapse which make life worse for everyone and nobody with any sense would wish for.
- It seems to me a lot of people channel their unhappiness into resentment of the wealthy, based on this same flavor of folk economics as old as time "the rich get richer". And that unhappiness is usually uncoupled from their position in the economic ladder.
The main asset most people have is their ability to do useful work for some employer. So for example, if a person has demonstrated a history of steady employment, some bank or finance firm would probably be willing to loan the person the money to buy a car or most of the money to buy a house.
34 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 75.5 ms ] threadIt would be misleading to suggest that a single person with zero wealth has more wealth than 100k people’s wealth combined. But that’s what this headline and report are doing.
It wouldn't be misleading. You may have to explain it to somebody who has absolutely no understanding of how finance works, but that doesn't make the statement misleading.
It doesn't even make sense. I think you meant to say "efficiently" perhaps but even arguing that is an uphill battle - at most you could say that is true for some types of projects.
The report puts the threshold for being in the top 10% of income earners at €65.5K. I suspect many HN users would fall into this category.
Related: is there a way to estimate what the wealth inequality was like pre-industrial revolution? It occured to me that in an era of kings, queens, aristocrats, and nobles it might be similar to what we see today. Without concluding whether it is right or wrong, would it have been very different for the bottom 90% in terms of inequality? Is it just the ‘who’ that makes up the very top of the wealth and income charts that is different?
People that see (growing) wealth inequality as a problem rarely perceive themselves as part of it, but e.g. anyone complaining about the "top 1%" on this forum is pretty likely to be part of the "problem" themselves, globally speaking.
I think that for a lot of issues "people richer than us" are mostly a convenient scapegoat to shift the blame upstream, e.g. with CO2 emissions: If you're an average "western" citizen, then you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability, and pointing at celebrities and their private jets or somesuch is no better than thinly veiled whataboutism in my view.
Most of their wealth is probably in companies operating globally. It seems more easy to tax profits in local markets. And increase competition…
I mean that's definition of top 10% that top 10% is better than other 90%. Journalists should prove read titles before submitting
The state owns national parks, army equipment, buildings... Also, the state owns an impact on regulated companies, subsidies, etc.
Just the US army receives funding about $1 trillion a year. It must own equipment, weapons, and buildings in a value of many trillions.
Every single citizen has a share in all of what the state owns and controls. The state also partially controls the wealth of billionaires.
So I suppose, that the top 0.001% holds as much value as... the bottom 5%?
How would you call them differently? The amount of power that wealth gives them over "us" is unfathomable.
We often contemplate history with lofty detachment, thinking how far we have come as humans and societies. Kings and queens seen as ancient fictions. Sure some KPIs like life expectancy/comfort improved thanks to technologies and progress. I don't deny all that, but that's not my point. The extreme majority of humans are still vessels/subjects to an absurd minority of other humans. How can't we see that as a failure?
It’s not like they are using their wealth on frivolous consumption. Which means redistribution would only change who controls the investment and not the actual consumption patterns of people. Implication is that poor people will consume the same as before after redistribution with perhaps some extra assets.
So nothing materially changes other than some security. Poor people will continue to consume the same as before. Bigger problem is it’s not so clear that redistribution is necessarily a good thing because I feel the people who made money are more likely to make better decisions on their own companies.
I don’t know how companies would fare if for example Amazon were redistributed and run like some public company.
(Posting again)
At least when they blow their money on some iberico ham a farmer somewhere keeps his livelihood. An expensive cocktail and a 200 year old distillery keeps its doors open. $100 tip on valet directly into the local economy. Live in housekeeper providing for their children.
Productivity is a cult. Why are the most “productive” things the most dehumanizing? What are the true great works of this world? Most reasonable people would say trying to help the poor, cure disease, save the environment. All things private investment has deemed insufficiently productive over some machiavellian horror.
A half of century ago, my grandparents were still relatively independent of the rest of the world, because they owned a house and some cultivated land, so even if their normal sources of revenue would have disappeared by becoming jobless, they could have still lived quite decently being sustained only by what they were producing in their garden and by their animals. They also did not depend on external services for things like water supply, garbage disposal or heating. They used electricity, but they had plenty of space so that today one could have used there enough solar panels to be also independent of external energy sources.
On the other hand, now I am living in a big city and I absolutely need a salary if I want to continue to live. Where I live there are no salaries for an engineer or programmer that are big enough so that one could ever buy a place like that owned by my grandparents.
I do not believe that this extreme dependency between employees and employers that has become more and more widespread during the last century will lead to anything good.
There are a lot of important technical problems that must be solved in order to ensure the survival of humanity, but the research to solve them is almost non-existent, because those who control the money are too short-sighted so they invest only according to various fads in research that will produce things of negligible benefit for most humans. The unsolved problems that have accumulated are such that only an effort of the kind that happened in the research done during World War II would solve them, but it seems unlikely that something like that will ever repeat.
I think the goal should be for everybody to have the ability to walk away from an abusive boss, landlord or spouse without jeopardizing their life essentials. Which is a stronger statement than just saying that everybody should be able to afford their life essentials.
Not having a boss or landlord is a great way of achieving this, but it's not the only way. (If you don't have a boss, you do need the freedom to turn away abusive clients or customers)
Another way is ensuring that the essentials are universally available. Universal health care, public housing and a SNAP program that's not itself abusive is another.
Another HN-popular mechanism is UBI.
Another mechanism that helps greatly is ensuring that the essentials are inexpensive. Clothing and food have become cheap, but healthcare and housing have more than absorbed the difference.
See, it isn't about having stuff, it is about having power over people. That's why inequality is horrible.
You can get a piece of land and have a simple house on it, get a wood stove, stop buying things that generate trash (grow your own food, etc. and compost all scraps). Raise animals like chickens and goats. Put in a well. There's a ton of guides and YouTube videos out there about people who homestead.
I know people who do this on 1-2 acres and are a couple hours from a major city. The reality is that it's a ton of work and there's downsides, it depends on what kind of person you are.
(This is responding to your specific comment, I know that choosing to do this in the developed world is different from people who have no choice and no options in a developing country/place).
not good.
This is always stated like if that was an obvious fact that somehow "action is needed" against the richest, but is it?
Does it matter that a few individuals are multi-billionaires (usually because of the notional value of shares they own)? I would say that it does not. What matters is how the majority and the poorest are faring, which is orthogonal.
Society has never been as rich as now, and people are getting out of misery faster and faster.
Drawing attention to the fact that some outliers have an insane amount of wealth has been shadowing the real problem: politics is in getting in the way of eradicating poverty.
Many people, mostly fueled by envy, misses that and instead focus on asking for taxing the wealthiest rather than noticing that poor people lives could be vastly improved by reducing taxation on them (rather than increasing the taxation of richer people, which is a silly take on the matter), removing economic barriers created by political forces, etc.
- Though the bottom half of humanity may be poor, on average they have a quality of life that has risen dramatically over the past century thanks in large part to the deployment of technologies and aid originating from the wealthier nations.
- Historically the only time the trend of wealth accumulation reverses is during massive crises, wars, and civilizational collapse which make life worse for everyone and nobody with any sense would wish for.
- It seems to me a lot of people channel their unhappiness into resentment of the wealthy, based on this same flavor of folk economics as old as time "the rich get richer". And that unhappiness is usually uncoupled from their position in the economic ladder.
it's a meaningless statistic.
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/thirteen-million-u...
The OP completely ignores this form of wealth.