http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... -the-world

The world's wealthiest people aren't known for travelling by bus, but if they fancied a change of scene then the richest 85 people on the globe – who between them control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population put together – could squeeze onto a single double-decker.

The extent to which so much global wealth has become corralled by a virtual handful of the so-called 'global elite' is exposed in a new report from Oxfam on Monday. It warned that those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £1tn, as much as the poorest 3.5 billion of the world's population.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 70714.html

The 85 richest people on the planet have accumulated as much wealth between them as half of the world’s population, political and financial leaders have been warned ahead of their annual gathering in the Swiss resort of Davos.

The tiny elite of multibillionaires, who could fit into a double-decker bus, have piled up fortunes equivalent to the wealth of the world’s poorest 3.5bn people, according to a new analysis by Oxfam. The charity condemned the “pernicious” impact of the steadily growing gap between a small group of the super-rich and hundreds of millions of their fellow citizens, arguing it could trigger social unrest.

we are all in this together

It'll trickle down though.....

That's one slow fucking trickle. Slower than pitch tar at -200 degrees C.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment

Given that the rich appear to be getting richer, wouldn't it be more correct to say that it's trickling up?

Well, I assume Bill Gates is on the list and he gives quite a lot of money to charity.

To be fair though I bet everyone on this forum individually earns more money than tens of millions of people.

Matt_B wrote:Given that the rich appear to be getting richer, wouldn't it be more correct to say that it's trickling up?

I would dispense with the whole notion of trickling and say it's being sucked up.

Rome Existed wrote:Well, I assume Bill Gates is on the list and he gives quite a lot of money to charity.

Bill Gates choosing to give to who he deems worthy does not justify an individual amassing such an obscene proportion of the world's resources.

Rome Existed wrote:
To be fair though I bet everyone on this forum individually earns more money than tens of millions of people.

True. For most of my life I've been in the top 10% in relative wealth terms, although that's changing fast. It's the size of the (growing) gap between the obscenely wealthy and the masses that is not 'being fair' though.

Rumraket wrote:

Matt_B wrote:Given that the rich appear to be getting richer, wouldn't it be more correct to say that it's trickling up?

I would dispense with the whole notion of trickling and say it's being sucked up.

The world economy is a bit like a pool table, tilted such that everything falls into the one pocket. Call it monopolising a form of leverage, if you will.

Capitalists write our laws. The primary goal of these laws is to ensure that capitalists keep as much money as possible and get taxed as little as possible. There is nothing in these laws about equal distribution of income. That would be like pigs writing laws about the proper way to fry bacon.

Serfdom never died. It just took on other names.

In other news, water is wet.

cuts in public services for the majority.

(from Guardian above)

I have lost the plot somewhere. The vast majority of taxes for welfare spending comes from the poor themselves. Why are the wealthy even concerned about losing a very small amount of their wealth for public goods?

Why do the wealthy want cuts in public services when they are so wealthy they do not actually notice any taxes they happen to pay, and reducing welfare services has no effect on them?

To be fair though

No

I think you are not understanding the exponential or logarithmic scale here.

I'd suspect that the vast majority of people on this forum who do earn a lot of money pay income tax on it at a rate substantially higher than the income of the very wealthy, which predominantly will only be attracting capital gains tax, and possibly not even that if they're any good at dodging it.

There's certainly nothing fair to my mind about that, whether they give some of their extra income to charity or not.

Oxfam report links to this - terrifying how they get the money - Computing, Walmart, Mars, Koch....

http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

full report available here

http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.or ... 114-en.pdf

6 pages summary

http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.or ... umm-en.pdf

According to that Forbes article, the top 20 billionaires in 2013 were:

[1] Carlos Slim Helu -$73 billion
[2] Bill Gates - $67 billion
[3] Amancio Ortega - $57 billion
[4] Warren Buffett - $53.5 billion
[5] Larry Ellison - $43 billion
[6] Charles Koch - $34 billion
[7] David Koch - $34 billion
[8] Li Ka Shing - $31 billion
[9] Liliane Bettancourt - £30 billion
[10] Bernard Arnault - $29 billion
[11] Christy Walton - $28.2 billion
[12] Stefan Persson - $28 billion
[13] Michael Bloomberg -$27 billion
[14] Jim Walton - $26.7 billion
[15] Sheldon Adelson - $26.5 billion
[16] Alice Walton - $26.3 billion
[17] S. Robert Walton - $26.1 billion
[18] Karl Albrecht - $26 billion
[19] Jeff Bezos - $25.2. billion
[20] Larry Page - $23 billion

Total wealth: $648.5 billion

These 20 individuals on their own, hold more wealth than the GDP of Switzerland, the GDP of Sweden, and have more money than the combined GDPs of Denmark and Malaysia. They have more money than the combined GDPs of the Czech Republic, Ireland and Portugal put together. They collectively have three and a half times the money of Kuwait, which, given that Kuwait is an oil producer, is really something startling. Indeed, they have more money than Kuwait, New Zealand, Romania and Hungary combined. If you want a really startling figure, then if you treat the GDP of a nation as its sale price, then these 20 individuals have enough money to buy a hundred and two countries. The full list of the countries they could buy is as follows:

Tuvalu
Montserrat
Nauru
Kiribati
Marshall Islands
Palau
Sao Tome & Principe
Cook Islands
Anguilla
Federated States of Micronesia
Tonga
Dominica
Comoros
Samoa
Saint Vincent & the Grenadines
Turks & Caicos Islands
Vanuatu
Zanzibar
Saint Kitts & Nevis
Grenada
Guinea-Bissau
British Virgin Islands
The Gambia
Solomon Islands
Seychelles
Antigua & Barbuda
Somalia
Saint Lucia
Djibouti
Liberia
Belize
San Marino
Bhutan
Cape Verde
Central African Republic
Burundi
Greenland
Lesotho
Aruba
Maldives
Guyana
Eritrea
Andorra
Cayman Islands
Swaziland
Mauritania
Togo
Fiji
Netherlands Antilles
Monetengro
Barbados
Suriname
Timor-Leste
Bermuda
Malawi
Monaco
Liechstenstein
Guinea
Kyrgyzstan
Kosovo
Niger
Rwanda
French Polynesia
Haiti
Moldova
Benin
Tajikistan
Bahamas
Malta
Laos
Republic of Macedonia
Zimbabwe
New Caledonia
Armenia
Madagascar
Chad
Palestinian Territory
Mali
Mongolia
Nicaragua
Burkina Faso
Mauritius
Albania
Namibia
Iceland
Senegal
Cambodia
Botswana
North Korea
Equatorial Guinea
Mozambique
Republic of the Congo
Jamaica
Papua New Guinea
Georgia
Brueni
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Nepal
Honduras
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Afghanistan

Anyone else regard this as scary?

The families are very interesting - Waltons, Kochs... I see no reason that they have not already acquired nuclear weapons for example.

The wealth of the Walton's is equal to the cost of a brand new Trident system.

They're not going to be buying any countries. Nor do I see why, if you could, GDP would be the 'price'. Yes, they are rich, yes it is obscene but not because they are about to pile their wealth in order to purchase a bunch of island-states and impoverished nations.

The concern, other than the inequality of it all, should be that they will and do use that money to corrupt governments.

Clive Durdle wrote:The families are very interesting - Waltons, Kochs... I see no reason that they have not already acquired nuclear weapons for example.

The wealth of the Walton's is equal to the cost of a brand new Trident system.

Been there, done that. See also here.

Calilasseia wrote:...if you treat the GDP of a nation as its sale price...

Why? Why on earth would we do that? What possible basis could there be for regarding a country's output in one year as if that were equal to its absolute value?

The notion was merely brought in as a graphic illustration of the gigantic wealth these people own. Or do you not understand the business of visualising large quantities?