I wouldn't have a problem with this if that wealth were tied up in, say, artworks and other 'intangibles'.

I do have a problem with this because that wealth is largely, I assume, representative of claims of ownership of resources that are fundamental necessities of human life (e.g. land, water, fish stocks/quotas, etc).

How about breaking it down by nation in an attempt to show how lopsided certain economic systems or legal frameworks are vs others? That would at least seem to provide a more complete view of the potential problem.

I'd also be interested in seeing a break-down per nation regarding wealth distribution in order to measure what appears to work and what does not from an economic/legal framework.

I might note that a lot of that wealth is in the unrealized labor of the many people that are in debt. I guess you could say that if all of those indebted people suddenly died, the wealth would evaporate.

And then the question of "was it really wealth to begin with" must be asked. Wealth is a function of added value.

I'm having a tough time wrapping my head around a) what this means, and b) what it implies about the world economy.

Naively, it sounds really bad because how could any individual produce more than tens or hundreds of millions of individuals? If they do not produce more than nations, then how is it fair that they have so much? Another intuition is that this is the product of technology being adopted much more rapidly by the titans of industry than by others, to great effect decreasing cost and increasing profit.

see my comment above, they are comparing net worth which is meaningless in most ways. while it sounds like the richest 30 or so people have more money than the entire world, they couldn't even pull their money and buy Calcutta.

they are comparing net worth, and even in america most people are worth 0 (or less). so yeah, lowly me is worth more than half a billion people, but their combined wages (even minute) would dwarf mine. but its not like you could take the 1%'s wealth and give it to everyone else and it would make any meaningful impact.

even if you took the top 10 richest people in the world and gave it to every person in just america, thats only about 1600$/person. They'd still be poor and there'd still be a richest 1% and apple would have sold a lot more iphones.

> Even in america most people are worth 0 (or less)

Wrong. In the US only about 4.1% of people in US have negative net worth (wiki stat). The rest with debt such as mortgages and the like have assets against this debt so while they owe the bank $300k type thing they have a $500k assets against this.

> even if you took the top 10 richest people in the world and gave it to every person in just america, thats only about 1600$/person. They'd still be poor and there'd still be a richest 1%

There will always be a richest 1%. Also ideally in a redistribution sence you wouldnt give to everyone, you'd redistribute to the bottom X%, and this would drastically change the $1,600 figure oyu quote (I'll trust your maths). And don't be distracted form the problem being addresses here is how much that 1% (or far fewer %) own of a nations wealth, not that there is a 1% class. It's not just the money either, extreme wealth can give influence and have other negative effects e.g. power within the political system, unproductive hoarded capital in a nation, and ability to monopolies by buying assets etc.

you might want to fact check, about 50% of the US has <=0 net worth.

if you sent the top 1 % to the death camps, by the laws of math, there will be a NEW top 1%. and guess what? because of my statements above, they would still be exponentially richer than the bottom.

The common misconception being that the poor are poor because the rich are rich;

But there is no causality. Not even a correlation.