I carelessly posted a story with a headline like this a week or two ago, but a more accurate statement would be that 85 people have as much wealth as the poorest half of the world's population.
that's still a pretty startling concept though - that you could make half the people in the world twice as well off as they are now by disenfranchising a mere 85 individuals, or that each of those on average holds as much wealth as 41 million very poor people. Of course there would be a knock-on effect that would hurt all the people who work for or do business with those 85. And as a statistic I'm not sure how valuable it is; even my averaging comment is misleading because the distribution of wealth within those 85 individuals likely has a rough Pareto distribution.
Like the author I'm not entirely convinced that this is bad, for the same reason that I don't consider elephants and whales to be in opposition to ants or plankton; Pareto distributions seem to be a fact of the natural world and so we shouldn't be too surprised to see them appear in distributions of wealth. Of course there are lots of natural things that are widely considered undesirable, so I anticipate increasing political pressure to alter such imbalances.
Most of the issue seems to comes down to "fairness". The natural world is not fair, but it is a working system. A elephant does not work harder than a an ant to survive, in fact you might say the opposite is true. The elephant won the ovarian lottery, this is not fair to the ant, but the system works.
I think it would be ridiculous to suggest that those 85 people worked 41 million times harder to get where they are compared to the other 3.5 billion, that's simply impossible. The successful seem to have a hard time grasping or accepting the amount of opportunity (luck) involved in their success.
I personally think its better to look at the economy as a game and the game must have arbitrary rules defined to "level the playing field". These rules must followed and enforced to maximize the enjoyment of the games participants. After all thats what a modern economy does, improve quality of life, not just survival. The rules will need to be modified and tuned over time to find the sweet spot. As with all games there will be super-stars and weak players that get compensated differently, however the ruleset will limit inequality to something "fair" and "enjoyable" to all participants.
One quote that always comes to mind: "The free market should be a prize fight not a barroom brawl".
I carelessly posted a story with a headline like this a week or two ago, but a more accurate statement would be that 85 people have as much wealth as the poorest half of the world's population.
that's still a pretty startling concept though - that you could make half the people in the world twice as well off as they are now by disenfranchising a mere 85 individuals, or that each of those on average holds as much wealth as 41 million very poor people. Of course there would be a knock-on effect that would hurt all the people who work for or do business with those 85. And as a statistic I'm not sure how valuable it is; even my averaging comment is misleading because the distribution of wealth within those 85 individuals likely has a rough Pareto distribution.
Like the author I'm not entirely convinced that this is bad, for the same reason that I don't consider elephants and whales to be in opposition to ants or plankton; Pareto distributions seem to be a fact of the natural world and so we shouldn't be too surprised to see them appear in distributions of wealth. Of course there are lots of natural things that are widely considered undesirable, so I anticipate increasing political pressure to alter such imbalances.