The Pitchforks Are Coming For Us Plutocrats (2014)

Re:The Pitchforks Are Coming For Us Plutocrats (2014) by roenxi on Thursday June 04, 2020 @08:30AM (#23415716)

But you've still got no idea how much inequality is present - you've got a lower bound and 3 orders of magnitude error. They might have 30x or 30,000x times. You could take an action, halve inequality, and not be able to detect any changes. If you can halve the problem and not detect any change I don't believe you've identified the problem.

However if you doubled your living standard you'd know all about it.

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Re:The Pitchforks Are Coming For Us Plutocrats (2014) by onion2k on Thursday June 04, 2020 @09:26AM (#23416248)

You could take an action, halve inequality, and not be able to detect any changes.

This assumes that halving the wealth of rich people would have no impact on the world other than changing this immeasurable inequality. That seems unlikely.

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Re:The Pitchforks Are Coming For Us Plutocrats (2014) by roenxi on Thursday June 04, 2020 @05:59PM (#23422452)

Most that wealth was created in the last 20 years. Amazon, Google, etc, etc barely or didn't exist in 2000. If you are >20 years old, you have seen a world where there was substantially less wealth and inequality. It would be very easy to reduce the wealth of rich people by returning to how the business world was in 2000. Pretty sure Bezos of Amazon is the richest man in the world right now.

Destroying the wealth would be the fastest and easiest way to reduce wealth inequality that has built up in the last 20 years. It is a terrible idea. So the problem to solve is probably not wealth inequality.

To try and put it simply, halving the wealth of rich people is bound to have an effect - but that effect might be great or horrific for everyone else.

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