In aggregate, the 400 richest billionaires put together only constitutes 4% of the total wealth in America.[1][2]
Even if you assume that power correlates perfectly with wealth, there's not really evidence that billionaires control anywhere near enough money to become a "permanent ruling class".
Well, expand that category to include every billionaire and also everyone above 100 million, as an arbitrary figure that most people will never make throughout their lives. I imagine that percentage will go up immensely.
Two thirds of wealth in America is owned by the bottom 99th percentile, i.e. households with less than $12 million net worth.[1] A near majority of wealth is owned by the 90th-99th percentile, i.e. households with between $1-12 million net worth.
By far the biggest source of wealth inequality is the division between the top and bottom 50th percentile, who have essentially zero wealth. The uber-wealthy may be rich on an individual basis, but in aggregate they still hold constitute significantly less than run-in-the-mill retirees, dentists, and actuaries.
That seems like a confused way of saying that those who are at least millionaires have 80% of the wealth.
It's much easier for a billionaire to hire lobbyists to protect his latest exploitative venture than it is for some dentist to do so. That's why the 1% held 30% of the total thirty years ago and they hold 40% now. That is a dark trend.
> Do you believe in meritocracy? Because ownership of that amount of wealth is surely going to skew the entire system.
Your focus is too narrow. Broaden the timeline -- the meritocratic spoils cascade across the generations, as they ever have. It's part of the motivation to achieve.
Is your stance that wealth in the hands of billionaires tends to do less good to raise the “common good” than if it were to be distributed in some way?
If so, what kind of distribution do you think makes sense?
You guys acting like democratic government has not yet been invented.
It's not like alternatives to billionaires owning the planet doesn't exist. Just America seems to be fairly resistant to the idea of public good.
And the other consideration is how the money of billionaires is actively used to make everyone else's lives worse, either through manipulating markets and commodities, raising our rent, or literally polluting and destroying the planet.
Or buying media and brain washing the population with their crazy ideologies. These are all highly negative events that come from a small group of people having control of too many resources.
No one yet has responded to me why it's such a great idea for billionaires to exist. I wonder if an argument could even be made that didn't even a personal fantasy/wish fulfillment scenario.
> No one yet has responded to me why it's such a great idea for billionaires to exist. I wonder if an argument could even be made that didn't even a personal fantasy/wish fulfillment scenario.
K, here's one, whether or not you accept it. I don't think the world would have SpaceX or Tesla were it not for the existence of billionaires.
Elon Musk already had a billion before founding/buying these companies. If he had "maxed out" and couldn't make any more money, I think there is a good chance he wouldn't have taken risks on these companies. I think we are better off with the existence of companies like these.
Even if you don't like Tesla or SpaceX, these are just examples. There are a lot of other companies that would not exist as well, especially if you consider the potential scarcity of funding in this scenario. And without their existence we would all be worse off.
There are downsides to having billionaires too, but it's pretty disingenuous to pretend there aren't upsides as well.
When you say we would not have Tesla or SpaceX, do you just mean the brand? Or that we would not have reusable rockets and electric cars?
That seems unlikely, considering the USSR produced the space launches, and electric cars existed before Tesla. Without billionaires, you'd also lose the Koch's making it hard to move away from fossil fuels, which I think would make electric cars significantly easier, rather than harder
If you just mean that we won't have those brand names, should I care? It's just a name
It's a mistake to conflate the work of entire companies with one man, and I strongly disagree about the state of progress in America if billionaires did not exist.
Someone else would have taken Musk's place. There is no inherent quality to billionaires that make them valuable outside of their wealth.
> especially if you consider the potential scarcity of funding in this scenario.
how is this an argument? I assume banks still exist in this world without billionaires?
As mentioned, there are other vehicles to obtain financing. Secondly, when billionaires disappear, their wealth doesn't disappear with them. Not sure what you are asking.
Because at least for big moonshot ideas, it's much easier for one billionaire to bankroll some crazy idea everyone else thinks is a waste of money.
And even if you could gather the funding, you now have to keep a few dozen investors happy versus just pursuing your idea however you want.
And sure the money doesn't disappear, but would you really expect an Amazon warehouse worker who now makes $70k instead of $35k to be investing in highly risky ventures? I mean, they wouldn't even qualify to invest.
r > g, where r is the rate of return and g is the overall economic growth of the economy.
It means the rich capture a growing portion of productivity, and in modern days it is on the strength of the financialization of productivity, not necessarily people actually doing work.
How is this an optimal system? How is it even a functioning system? What we are doing as a species, today, right now, is not working and our ability to live on this planet is increasingly in danger.
So? I already said that I have utmost respect for those who create wealth. I am in full support to letting people create wealth as much as they want.
What I firmly oppose is someone who has a birth lottery of being born to such wealth creators - they don't deserve to inherit a vast fortune and all the power and privilege that come with it.
Familial wealth disperses and collapses pretty quickly, eventually being split up between 2 to the n heirs thereabouts.
Irrespective, the wealth is the property of an individual who earned that wealth through voluntary exchange. If they want to give it all to their kids, to a charitable cause, or just destroy it, that should be their right as owners of that property, it is not just for the state to steal that property because some people don't like it when the parent decides to give that wealth to the child. Focus taxation on things that harm an unwilling third party, not things that involve only two consenting parties where nobody is made worse off.
If I'm a fitness coach charging $60/hour, all my customers are there because they think I'm providing a service of value greater than $60/hour. Perhaps their subjective value is $80/hour, so they get $20/hour benefit and decide voluntarily to engage in this transaction with me. This is a positive sum voluntary transaction where all parties are better off (except for the carbon pollution which we expelled to drive to the venue, which I think should be taxed!).
I find it hard to believe that anyone could disagree with the above, which means you must disagree that the fruits of this exchange should be my property. Well let me ask you this: the customer made $20 in utility by engaging in this transaction with me. Why should they be able to keep the $20 utility but I must give up part of the $60? And what right do you have to reach into my pocket? If my customers instead traded groceries for my hour of training, should I not be able to keep these groceries?Is it only money that makes the difference for you?
No one is trying to take the $60 an hour you make coaching. The way Bezos or Gates or Zuckerberg make their wealth is not at all similar to how you or I do. If you want to take the conservative argument, Gates taking my tax dollars by selling his computers to the government is not a voluntary transaction. He then takes that money to lobby the government so that I have to give him even more of my tax money.
If you assume that "individual property earned through voluntary exchange" is the ultimate value to be upheld, you may end up having to defend a hellscape world. You need at least to temper it with something along the lines of the Lockean proviso.
I fully agree with this, I see it as one value to be upheld among many others in a Pareto-like trade-off. Optimizing for only a single value is going to lead to pathological outcomes as you rightly point out.
But I do consider it an important value since a lot of the motivation behind redistribution is self interest and jealousy (this is a finding in social science research), benelovant compassion only explains a small proportion of the variation.
I made my money by creating software and engaging in voluntary transactions with people (mostly wealthy people) who wanted to transact with me and would've been worse off having not done so. It was totally positive sum with no harmed third party. A very large proportion of transactions (plastic surgery, sports cars, entertainment, holidays, restaurants, personal trainer, Netflix, etc) are of this nature where the rebuttal that "it's not really voluntary" doesn't apply in the least.
1. As for what decides the individual's rights in a society, this is a pretty complicated question but the answer is going to be rooted in evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution and memetic evolution.
On what grounds do they hold that right? I'm not religious so I can't appeal to an ultimate moral authority. See (2).
2. If you grant and enforce property rights you stake the individual, and the overall outcome is a more prosperous world. Removing property rights is a good way to collective starvation, it's been tried before. So it's moral in the sense that enforcing property rights minimises human suffering through the above mechanism.
The existence of compound interest and exponential growth mean wealth inequality will become more and more extreme over time as generational wealth accumulates.
History teaches us that extreme inequality and class resentment leads to societal collapse. First there is civil unrest, then revolution. We have seen the beginning of some serious civil unrest this year.
From a purely self-interested point of view, if you value living in a peaceful and stable society, you ought to be concerned about wealth inequality. Generational wealth is one of the major factors here.
>In America, at least, we have historically rejected the idea of a hereditary monarchy.
Just looking at history of presidents...George Bush Jr and George Bush Sr. Do you think George Bush Jr would have been president if his father wasn't? I'm not saying that GWB isn't competent or anything like that...but is your assertion that if he didn't have the name (and inherited wealth and connections), he would have been a viable candidate?
Same could be said about the Clinton's, so I don't think this is partisan.
In a hereditary monarchy, the king rules until he dies, or abdicates in favor of his son. If this breaks down, through war, sibling rivalry, or lack of an heir... that tends to be a real problem.
In the United States, the titular head of state is chosen through a weird gameshow, and any given head of state can play that game twice. On two occasions, the son of a successful game show contestant has leveraged name recognition to also win a round in the hot seat.
Right, and we also have billionaires. That doesn't seem to negate the fact that historically, this country explicitly rejected the idea of a hereditary monarchy.
I don’t. I don’t believe more than about 10 million should be able to be passed on to children. Maybe less than that. Just having been born to such rich parents is an opportunity that gives them incredible legs up in society, let alone them getting a ton of money due to the luck of their birth. If a parent that rich cares about their child they have many ways to help them achieve in life. If it is actually possible for a person to be so much better at creating things than another that they deserve billions of dollars, the parent can pass on that skill to their child. It’s hard enough to keep wealth from accumulating without also letting it accumulate across generations.
If I had a billion pounds of rice, and millions of people were starving, would it be immoral for me to stockpile that so 50 generations of my family would be taken care of before the millions of starving people now?
Edit: because i can't reply right now:
I'm curious if a direct application of your question to something you need to survive would get a different answer.
We think of money as something we can accumulate without limit but if you replace it with other things in a similar context it seems different. Why is it okay for billionaires to exist, but not for someone to stockpile too much food?
Yes. 1-2-3 generations, ok. 50? Definitely immoral. They'd be as remote to you as a random fisherman in Kamchatka. They should also make their own contributions to society.
If someone earns billions, they can do whatever they want with it as long as it is legal. Only when someone gets something which is not earned, that should become a taxable event.
This way, a billionaire giving his fortune away won't be taxed. If that fortune goes to charity, still not taxed. If that fortune goes to his kids or to their trust fund, it should be heavily taxed.
> You don’t believe that if someone makes billions they should be able to pass it on to their children?
I believe no individual has ever _earned_ a billion USD. If it were up to me, people like Jeff Bezos would have everything to their name seized by the state. It should be used for the benefit of the many -- and not a selected few. He'll be compensated with a trophy, though: "Congratulations, you won capitalism. Continue for New Game+."
