> wealth disparity between the 1%ers and the rest of the world

To make the Global Top 1% you have to earn $32,400. [1]

Being a billionaire puts you in the top .00003% of human. There are ~2200 billionaires out of 7.55 billion people.

> To make the Global Top 1% you have to earn $32,400

It always troubles me when people throw this global piece into it. This global number is absolutely meaningless outside of a regional and often even city based economy.

The quality of life someone can purchase for their family with a $34,000 salary if we live in SF is a terrible and incredibly rough quality of life.

When people speak about the 1%, they are typically speaking colloquially about the 1% from any given region.

The quality of life one can purchase for their family with a $34,000 salary in NYC is still just awful when compared to quality of life of the richest people in China or the richest people in India.

Anyone living on $34K in NYC has the option of living like a peasant in China, India, or even poorer countries. If you don't want to emigrate, you can do Peace Corps or other volunteer work and have all your expenses paid for, as well as still knowing that your American citizenship and all your assets will still be here when you get back. Relatively few people take advantage of this option. A very, very large number of people living in those countries are willing to risk everything for a shot at immigrating to the U.S. and living on a lot less than $34K in NYC.

That should tell you something about the relative desirability of these lives for most people, even if the dollar amounts are unreliable.

(BTW, the richest people in China and India are very rich, oftentimes richer than their counterparts in the U.S. - the article said that 50% of the occupants of the Boulevard Penthouses were from China. So that's not really a fair comparison. Take a population of 2.5B and compare it with a population of 300M and even if the means of the former are much lower, the outliers are likely to be higher.)

> Anyone living on $34K in NYC has the option of living like a peasant in China, India, or even poorer countries. If you don't want to emigrate, you can do Peace Corps or other volunteer work and have all your expenses paid for, as well as still knowing that your American citizenship and all your assets will still be here when you get back. Relatively few people take advantage of this option. A very, very large number of people living in those countries are willing to risk everything for a shot at immigrating to the U.S. and living on a lot less than $34K in NYC.

Using an entire paragraph to simply restate the old saying "If you don't like the US of A, you can just get the hell out" doesn't make the argument any more compelling than it is as a simple sentence.

Some of us would prefer to rather than point at the worst nations and say "Welp, guess we should stop asking questions because at least we don't have it that bad." that we should look at places who appear as if they may be doing better and ask "What are they doing differently from us? And can we emulate any of their policies to improve our own society?"

Looking for new information in order to possibly optimize systems is logical from my perspective.

But if you believe people should not be allowed to ask these questions unless they're first willing to "get the hell out" I suppose that is your prerogative.

You'd still be living way better than the global 90%, who are living off rice and sleeping on dirt floors. I get your comment though, it's really inconvenient when people make you consider reality.

This calculator adjusts for cost of living: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i/

Earning at least $55,000 per year in the US with a household of one adult puts you in the top 1%.

$32,000 puts you in the top 3.4%, which is still pretty good.

Again, when looking at wealth disparity, these numbers immediately lose their meaning once you begin to remove regional and local context.

We must take into account what quality of life that salary will purchase for the location in which the worker actually inhabits. Not what that salary would purchase somewhere the worker doesn’t live.

With your example the US based salary of $55,000 is not 1% in the US. In the US a one percenter salary begins at ~$389,400/yr. The quality of life you can purchase with a salary is incredibly location specific.

A salary becomes meaningless once you remove location specific variables. This is why salaries vary for the exact same job depending on what city you live in—a network analyst in SF will likely make more than a network analyst in Keokuk, Iowa. Generally we try to get salaries to have equivalent purchasing power based on the local economy in which the worker will actually be existing.

We can’t meaningfully look at wealth gaps and disparities if we remove all context of what quality of life a local job’s salary can purchase in that specific locale.

I originally phrased that sentence as "the 1% and the remaining 99%" but I changed it to "the 1%ers". I realised it isn't a 1-99% of the global population, but my understanding of the term "one percent-ers" is that it described the elite rich amongst even the elite rich, i.e. the multiple billionaires that are few and far between in society.

Really puts in perspective how bad it has gotten.

Indeed, we all long for the days, before 1800 or so, the overwhelming majority of human history, when the people living on more than $2 a day were a vanishingly small minority.

The expansion of health, wealth, education and prosperity since WW2 has been particularly revolting. Education and lifespan have increased on every continent and wealth per person has increased on every continent bar Africa.

This is not the wretched poverty, suffering and disease, the death in childbirth, the children dying in their droves in infancy that we deserve.

Are you denying that the income and wealth disparity between the poor and the rich is currently widening?

You're just sat in the 1%, looking up at the .01% and decrying the immorality of their success. Worldwide, the number of people living in extreme poverty has IIRC halved since the 90s. Fatal diseases in third world countries are being prevented. Things are getting better for the most vulnerable people but everyone is focused on how unjust it is that Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos makes more than them. Why care?

>Why care?

Because humans (apes also do this) don't look at absolutes. They look at the relative. And they ask if it's fair. Human-like primates obsess about fairness.

I'm not in the 1%. The reason I care is because the primary reason for still so many people living in poverty, is the people hoarding money and doing what they can against anything that could change that.

The people in the article aren't hoarding money. They are paying the salaries of many people with their gaming.

And afterwards they will still have thousands of times what regular people have.

The thousands of people employed, directly and indirectly, by those same casinos will have employment.

so what? Should we all have the same, or similar? I would've thought the focus would be on lifting up the poorest, not bringing down the richest. If you bankrupted every billionaire in the world you could give everyone on the planet about $1000, and that's presuming that a) net worth estimates are accurate and b) liquidating a billionaire's net worth would actually result in that amount of cash (it wouldn't). Ultra-rich individuals hoarding money aren't exactly emptying out the economy.

I disagree with the premise that some unelected individuals should control such a disproportionate amount of ressources, and therefore power, yes.

OK, but the primary reason billionaires are so rich is from running or founding companies that produce much more value than the billionaires extract. Take away the idea that a successful founder can keep maybe 1% (at most, probably a vast overestimate) of the value they generate, and you'll have vastly fewer founders unless you find another way to motivate them.

In terms of power, ideally there would be a clean separation between money and political power. Some countries are better at this than others. Extremely wealthy people can wield a lot of power internationally, and that's bad. But them having more resources is not a bad thing in my mind unless they can use those resources to hurt people. As far as I'm aware, most don't.

> OK, but the primary reason billionaires are so rich is from running or founding companies that produce much more value than the billionaires extract. Take away the idea that a successful founder can keep maybe 1% (at most, probably a vast overestimate) of the value they generate, and you'll have vastly fewer founders unless you find another way to motivate them.

You are contradicting yourself. The value is generated by the company, i.e. the workers. Not the founder. The founder just extracts this value and makes themselves more powerful.

There can be no clean separation between money and political power. Politics is the struggle for the power to allocate ressources. Money is ressources.

> You are contradicting yourself. The value is generated by the company, i.e. the workers. Not the founder. The founder just extracts this value and makes themselves more powerful.

This is just ideological rubbish. It's not either-or. Workers perform the manual labour and such, but management plans, organises and directs. Labour can't exist without management beyond a trivial level, and the founders (or more realistically, the executives) design and direct the whole company's strategy. If you look around you can see plenty of examples where incompetent direction can kill a company and strong direction can build an extremely valuable one. Founders also accept the risk of failure, and are expected (in any sane workplace) to make more sacrifices than the employees while the company is still small. In essence, the company is the vehicle for the founders' will. Labour is fairly interchangeable compared to that.

> There can be no clean separation between money and political power. Politics is the struggle for the power to allocate ressources. Money is ressources.

You know what I mean. Elections should be won on the strength of the platform, not the size of the budget won from super PACs or wealthy single donors. Of course politicians, when in power, shuffle money around.

> It's not either-or. Workers perform the manual labour and such, but management plans, organises and directs.

Both of these things are work, yes. But one is not thousands of times more valuable than the other. The income of the owners is derived from their ownership of the company. Not from the work.

>You know what I mean.

Yes, I know what I mean. But what you mean doesn't actually make sense. Money in politics is a problem, because it gives some people more power over the politics, i.e. how ressources are allocated.

Billionaires who control a similar amount of ressources as a government through ownership aren't any better though. They have just as much power, and they don't even have to go through the trouble of fixing an election for it.

> The income of the owners is derived from their ownership of the company. Not from the work.

The company isn't going to be worth anything unless the founders turn it into something valuable. In that way, the income of the founders is derived from their ability to create value. That's an alignment of incentives if ever I've heard one. Investors derive their income from their ability to gauge risk and value, and allocate resources to founders who will create the most value with them.

> Yes, I know what I mean. But what you mean doesn't actually make sense. Money in politics is a problem, because it gives some people more power over the politics, i.e. how ressources are allocated.

To be honest my preferred solution is to minimise the ties between money and politics in general - the state shouldn't be given free reign to dick around in the economy, but only regulate and redistribute when it can be shown that a specific industry is broken in a specific way (negative externalities, natural monopolies, etc). I don't have a solution to this problem, but I think it would work better than what we have right now. When the state can basically do what it pleases there's a lot more room for backroom deals and loopholes.

> Billionaires who control a similar amount of ressources as a government through ownership aren't any better though.

But they are, because they don't have a military or police force to wield as a weapon against people they don't like. They can still be dicks but they are limited in their ability to harm others. Governments have no such restrictions, and have shown their propensity to use violence over reason on plenty of occasions.

>To be honest my preferred solution is to minimise the ties between money and politics in general - the state shouldn't be given free reign to dick around in the economy, but only regulate and redistribute when it can be shown that a specific industry is broken in a specific way (negative externalities, natural monopolies, etc). I don't have a solution to this problem, but I think it would work better than what we have right now. When the state can basically do what it pleases there's a lot more room for backroom deals and loopholes.

That is still politics deciding how ressources are allocated. Your solution is to give over the power over ressources to private individuals, instead of controlling them democratically. I think this process gives too much power to a few individuals.

> Your solution is to give over the power over ressources to private individuals, instead of controlling them democratically.

The idea that we democratically control the government is basically a myth. Once we elect a party based on some loose promises, they have free reign to do whatever they want. We're basically voting for one of 2 sets of ideas that we dislike the least, and then giving absolute power to the people who parrot those ideas. Those that aren't part of the elected party (department heads outside the cabinet) are also effectively unelected leaders and will continue to hold power after a new party is elected. What I want is a limit on absolute power, for anyone. Currently the state apparatus is a form of absolute power, and thus a magnet for the kinds of corruption we're talking about. I'd much rather we kept a balance of power between the economy, the individual and the state such that each has its own power and none can force the hand of another. But that's just idealism really, I just think that for now billionaires are the lesser evil compared to the state.

That is a very specific description of the american voting system. I am not american. I agree that the current models of democratic control are severly and fundamentally flawed. But it's frightening to me that you think giving the power to private Billionaires with no democratic legitimization instead is a better solution.

This is what people mean when they say Capitalist Libertarianism is a form of Authoritarianism.

I'm also not American, I'm British. We had a direct democratic vote very recently, which (regardless of whether you like the outcome or not) was surrounded by the most irrational propaganda I've ever seen, from both sides of the aisle. If you want more democracy, expect more of that. I'm also not a libertarian nor particularly a capitalist (I prefer syndicalism on a conceptual level), so your characterisation is both incorrect and reductionist.

OK so if giving private citizens more power (though I'd phrase it as axing bad regulations) is "scary", what's the worst outcome? Compared to giving more power to the state? Because as far as I'm aware, almost all historical atrocities have been committed by states. The first three billionaires who jump into my head immediately (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos) pioneered personal computing, founded one of the most impactful charities in existence, vastly improved the portability of computing, and commoditised online shopping and started a private space agency. Can you think of anything billionaires have done that doesn't involve political corruption that is really really bad compared to the good that said individual has brought to the world?

(without diving into the intricacies of whether people like Carl Icahn provide a net benefit, but I'm pretty against Wall Street and the public stock market anyway).

Did you intend to link a reference?