I wonder if instead of shaking their fist at the sky in anger with billionaires, we could run influence campaigns to:
Collect enough money to run marketing campaigns for billionaires to give more money to charity. (I don’t super trust politicians to tax them more and I am not sure that taxing them would even be effective given that there are always tax havens and loopholes, but persuasion should be possible, not extraordinarily expensive and have a high cost-benefit IMHO)
What I always find peculiar about this is the wealth disparities even at the highest levels. Andy Jassy for instance, or David Solomon (CEO of Goldman), have less than 1% of the bulge bracket class and certainly have similar work demands and impacts.
Honestly, I don't care how rich the rich are. The thing is, that for most part the poor become richer alongside the rich. Yeah, the gap widens, but what does it matter, if you also become more rich?
People shaking their fist at this on hacker news is weird.
Yes there is growing wealth inequality in the world. Because we invented a way to turn capital in to more capital without humans.
Bezos is just the first of many. He also has on average made other people richer than he has pocketed, he doesn't own more than 50% of Amazon, his investors (shareholders, pension funds, the US government) have all done incredibly well out of his vision and enterprise.
I love Prime, I love AWS, I love that I can get rare books over night at a great price. Should he be wealth capped? Should he innovate less as he get's more? Not as long as the primary way he makes money is through computers, that would just be self defeating. As someone who lives in Europe, the tech sector is America's growth engine and has defined the gap between the two economies, we'd love a Jeff Bezos.
I'll repeat here what I am saying since 2022 [0]. Focusing on wealth inequality does not work. Concentration of wealth is a symptom of the large problem of concentration of power. Get rid of the mega-corporations, and it will be virtually impossible to have this much wealth in the hands of a single individual.
Just put a cap on the size of a company. Break any corporation that has more than 150 employed people. Count independent contractors as employees if more than 1/3 of their income is dependent on any single customer.
Won't take long until the apologist come in defending the billionaires, how they create businesses and value and prop up the economy with their spending yadi yadi.
When the process that skews the wealth distribution has run this course, the billionaires and their cronies own everything and you have nothing do you think they'll show up to pay your child's education or your health care or your elderly care? They won't.
They'll kick you to the curb and remove democracy since any real democracy is a direct threat to them. Then they'll continue their lavish parties on their yachts while you and your family go hungry in the slums.
People argue that UBI means people won't bother to work
Yet any billionaire can quite happily retire to a private island with every possible need catered for. Want to travel to Japan for a photo, just ask your PA and there's a helicopter waiting taking you to a plane by the time you put your shoes on.
Anyone with a wealth of $10m can live the life of a very well paid worker ($500k a year)
Anyone with a wealth of $2m can live like the average American.
Anyone with a wealth of $500k can live "like a king" in cheaper locations.
The word 'made' is a peculiar one. If we are talking about creating value, then the definition of value is also kind of tricky. Does it add anything to the world or does it just move stuff around in a zero sum game.
In any case, in my opinion, blaming Bezos for being Bezos, is looking in the wrong direction. The real issue is; who enabled this? And a good place to start, is to look at yourselves in a mirror.
No it's not. It's based on how much he "made" in the first half of 2020, mostly originating from gains in Amazon's stock, in a period specifically selected to inflate the number. If you actually want to display how much Bezos made since the user opened the page, there are many public APIs to get live stock data and you could show the actual live gain/loss. But that wouldn't really support the point you're trying to make, since there would be days where he actually loses more money than most people ever see.
Also anyone who owns Amazon stock in their investment accounts - or who owns the S&P 500 - is also making and losing money when Jeff Bezos makes or loses money, for exactly the same reason.
Billionaires in countries with large inequality, like the developing and the US, are like Gods, not so much in low inequality, like Denmark.
There are two ways to diminish their role and position without robing them: reduce the inequality or stop worshiping the consumerism and focus in non-material ideas. Both are difficult but effective.
$116k — Senior software developer yearly salary. Interns makes more than that in US. Not that anybody's hiring interns anymore, but that's not the point.
$142k — "basic" Aston Martin Vantage. The base model starts at $192k currently. I don't remember times where new AM was anywhere near 140k no matter how "basic".
$182k — Fully loaded Tesla Model S. This one is the most egregious. More expensive than Aston Martin? Come on, a fully loaded Plaid is $115k with delivery right now.
Haven't watched further since I was already too flabbergasted by how much those numbers didn't match my expectations.
Where do I submit a bug report? AMZN is down 2% today but that number still go up.
To be clear, wealth inequality is absolutely one of the most critical social problems today, just that simplistic numbers like this stifle useful discourse.
The numbers are based on Bezos' $56.7 billion gains during the first half of 2020 (source: Bloomberg and Buzzfeed), which translates into approximately $311 million per day, or $3,605 every second
> simplistic numbers like this stifle useful discourse
Do they? I would agree that it would be much better to just state the above on the page itself, but not because it makes a practical difference. It probably would make it feel even worse, if that was possible, for people who thinking back on the hardships they and/or others went through in that Covid period.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 42.0 ms ] thread_What can I, as an individual, do to counter wealth inequality?_
It feels like breaking my fist against a brick wall.
Collect enough money to run marketing campaigns for billionaires to give more money to charity. (I don’t super trust politicians to tax them more and I am not sure that taxing them would even be effective given that there are always tax havens and loopholes, but persuasion should be possible, not extraordinarily expensive and have a high cost-benefit IMHO)
Yes there is growing wealth inequality in the world. Because we invented a way to turn capital in to more capital without humans.
Bezos is just the first of many. He also has on average made other people richer than he has pocketed, he doesn't own more than 50% of Amazon, his investors (shareholders, pension funds, the US government) have all done incredibly well out of his vision and enterprise.
I love Prime, I love AWS, I love that I can get rare books over night at a great price. Should he be wealth capped? Should he innovate less as he get's more? Not as long as the primary way he makes money is through computers, that would just be self defeating. As someone who lives in Europe, the tech sector is America's growth engine and has defined the gap between the two economies, we'd love a Jeff Bezos.
Just put a cap on the size of a company. Break any corporation that has more than 150 employed people. Count independent contractors as employees if more than 1/3 of their income is dependent on any single customer.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641
When the process that skews the wealth distribution has run this course, the billionaires and their cronies own everything and you have nothing do you think they'll show up to pay your child's education or your health care or your elderly care? They won't.
They'll kick you to the curb and remove democracy since any real democracy is a direct threat to them. Then they'll continue their lavish parties on their yachts while you and your family go hungry in the slums.
He risked it all and worked hard to start one of the world's biggest companies, he shouldn't be rewarded for that?
I really don't get it.
Yet any billionaire can quite happily retire to a private island with every possible need catered for. Want to travel to Japan for a photo, just ask your PA and there's a helicopter waiting taking you to a plane by the time you put your shoes on.
Anyone with a wealth of $10m can live the life of a very well paid worker ($500k a year)
Anyone with a wealth of $2m can live like the average American.
Anyone with a wealth of $500k can live "like a king" in cheaper locations.
But people carry on working.
In any case, in my opinion, blaming Bezos for being Bezos, is looking in the wrong direction. The real issue is; who enabled this? And a good place to start, is to look at yourselves in a mirror.
We did this. All of us.
There are two ways to diminish their role and position without robing them: reduce the inequality or stop worshiping the consumerism and focus in non-material ideas. Both are difficult but effective.
I like to read a bit before bed.
According to this website:
$116k — Senior software developer yearly salary. Interns makes more than that in US. Not that anybody's hiring interns anymore, but that's not the point.
$142k — "basic" Aston Martin Vantage. The base model starts at $192k currently. I don't remember times where new AM was anywhere near 140k no matter how "basic".
$182k — Fully loaded Tesla Model S. This one is the most egregious. More expensive than Aston Martin? Come on, a fully loaded Plaid is $115k with delivery right now.
Haven't watched further since I was already too flabbergasted by how much those numbers didn't match my expectations.
To be clear, wealth inequality is absolutely one of the most critical social problems today, just that simplistic numbers like this stifle useful discourse.
The numbers are based on Bezos' $56.7 billion gains during the first half of 2020 (source: Bloomberg and Buzzfeed), which translates into approximately $311 million per day, or $3,605 every second
> simplistic numbers like this stifle useful discourse
Do they? I would agree that it would be much better to just state the above on the page itself, but not because it makes a practical difference. It probably would make it feel even worse, if that was possible, for people who thinking back on the hardships they and/or others went through in that Covid period.