Given most people are not super-wealthy, popular shows are much more likely to have been sympathetic to that view.

No one wants to watch a show that says "Actually things are pretty good compared to how they were, and still improving, and while there are a few really rich people in the world, it wouldn't change your life for the better if they didn't exist."

Do you have any idea then number of people and the volume of resources that go to servicing the wealthy? Yes, I think we'd be doing better if there were fewer extraordinarily wealthy people. They aren't necessary to work together to achieve economies of scale, but they sure are fucking expensive.

Do you? Do you really think you can magically turn raw materials + work needed to build a super yacht into something of global consequence ? Or a Pollock painting will magically turn into a 1000 homes? Or that 1% consumes significantly more food? Most ultra-rich sh*t is immaterial to struggles of regular people. Even if 1%ers consumes extra 300 square meters of real eastate if you divide it across the 99% you will get an extra 3 square meters. It's immaterial.

I have seen this sentiment and on the surface its looks right. But I feel that we are missing here some real studies that should be done into impact of life style of the rich on the whole economy. I know few rich people (some of them ungodly rich). And seeing glimpses of their life style I cannot simply ignore cohorts of supporting jobs that make it all possibile (just to mentions few : private guards, house keeps, gardeners, cooks, private pilots on call, yaht crew members, drivers).

And yet account for all of that and divide it across remaining population and it will come out to nothing. The majority of their wealth is super inflated assets that would not change anyones life if divided across the population.

According to Wikipedia, in 2016 the Top 500 richest Germans, owned a combined wealth of 692 Mrd. €. That's around 8500 EUR per German citizen (infants and kids included) in 2016 - more today. For some people that is an amount that substantially affects their life.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_500_reichsten_Deutsc...

Yes, but you are liquidating the companies they own. If you consume them, they become much smaller, which means they have less employees, less work, less income, etc.

This is consuming capital for expenditures, which will in a macro view reduce wages in the long term.

that includes real estate in Monaco priced at 100K per square meter, works of arts jewels, stocks trading at 100+ PE etc. e.g. sh#t not convertible into shelter, food and other things people need. It's not that elastic on a gloabl scale.

The majority of this is ownership, for example the Quandt family owns nearly 50% of BMW. Stefan Quandt alone owns 25% of BMW. It's pretty elastic - and that wealth share of 700 billion is owned by 500 out of 80 Million people or 0.000625% of the population.

You are assuming that thats convertible to something tangible which it isn't at global scale. We just had a large scale experiment in this area with Covid. Food prices went up real estate is through the roof.

> The majority of this is ownership, for example the Quandt family owns nearly 50% of BMW.

This is still based on two massive misunderstandings:

1. This share is cash, when it is not. It is just evaluated as a cash value for simplicity. Removing these people's shareholding does not make actual money appear.

2. People have to buy shares in order for them to be worth anything. Why would anyone buy shares in your world?

> And seeing glimpses of their life style I cannot simply ignore cohorts of supporting jobs that make it all possibile

You shouldn't ignore them. They all get paid, which circulates money through the economy.

Sure, but I believe that money and money circulation is only means to an end and this feels like loosing the sight of end goal. Its a bit like saying that war is a viable economy booster (it can eventually create economic boom like WW2 has done in mamy countries that were rebuilding but this only make sens if You ingnore the obvious upfront costs)

There is no end goal. The end is not in sight for progress; we need to keep going, and keep in place the one system that has really allowed it.

And yes, they are a means to an end (uplift your family's lot; achieve personal goals through the choices money allows; stay healthy as long as possible; etc etc).

It creates real jobs and wealth. A friend of mine has 200 people employed in his family office.

What wealth does a yacht crew member create? A private guard? Or a private chef? These are all luxuries wholly consumed by the individual rich person, and whatever "wealth" may have been created vanishes the next day under the spin of the hedonic treadmill.

The labor of these employees could have instead been directed towards build infrastructure, nursing, childcare, or any other number of jobs which generate real and persistent wealth which compounds across generations.

>The labor of these employees could have instead been directed towards build infrastructure, nursing, childcare, or any other number of jobs which generate real and persistent wealth which compounds across generations.

Yeah, that's called investment, and rich people also get flak for that.

> The labor of these employees could have instead been directed towards build infrastructure, nursing, childcare, or any other number of jobs which generate real and persistent wealth which compounds across generations.

This is a silly yardstick. There are countless jobs like that. Probably half the people on HN don't have those jobs, and aren't employed by the super rich. If you're choosing who to criticise and then making up criticisms, and don't care if those criticisms also apply to countless other situations, then that's unlikely to be convincing. Except to those looking for a reason to justify their preconceptions.

"Real jobs and wealth" ... imagine putting them to work into something truly useful and creative, rather than a group of beck and call people.

"putting them to work" - what are you talking about? They are choosing jobs.

Im guessing that He is talking about "having job" being a poor abstraction for value creation from point of view of whole society. Its like triple A rating for CDOs backed by subprime morgages. On the surface it seems good but if You look close enough You will see only bullshit and wishful thinking.

I don't think your comparison holds. There is not whole society acting in concert, nor even in agreement about what is valuable. There are just individuals, some of whom band together into companies and other organisations, all with different priorities.

I believe that throughout history few golden rules emerged (most of them boil down to "do as You would be done") which keeps our societies more or less stable (we, or rather some of us, are still here, dont we?). Even those who abhore this rules most of the time keeps it to themselves. But if we as a society give individuals too much power then some of them will try to impose their own random ideas and values on us. This was happening with kings and feudal lords and this is happening now with some (if not all) of capitalistic roulette winners.

We're not giving power as a a society. We are rewarding people through a system who create value in that system.

If I can sell a billion people a widget for $2 that cost me $1 to make and ship, then I become a rich person without "society" being involved or "giving" anything.

The people who have generally perpetrated tragedies have been tied to government rather than commerce. Your examples are all governments or equivalent, and this is where your final analogy is inadequate, I think. The power balance is ultimately that any government at any time can ban any company.

Exactly. Thank you. Who is really doing the "choosing" here.

I'll take the 3 metres, thanks.

I hate this kind of framing. People use it all the time. "It only costs 50p per person of the population to maintain the UK Royal Family" ...

Pfft, in total there is the potential to do something more significant, more useful, and .... material.

Sure you will but you will never get it though. Because there will be a class of people who decide who should get that extra 3 meters and as my experience growing up in USSR tells me it's ain't gonna be you.

Yup. All these arguments about wealth distribution are typically “solved” by just shifting that wealth to another select group. Of course entirely due to meritocracy - being an expert in Leninism require a certain lifestyle you understand.

I have no argument against policies which support those at the bottom end. But to pretend that an equitable outcome is possible in the long term ignore thousands of years of human experience.

A class of people? You mean our democratically elected officials? For all their flaws, I would rather they do something productive with "some" of the resources we're talking about here rather than putting it to use on just another bottle of Dom Perignon. Sure, even that generates economic activity, but there are much better economically multiplying activities that can be invested in.

Officials are not democratically elected.

Mine is. Sorry if you're living in North Korea. I'm rooting for your revolution.

You vote for all the officials that write your legislation and bylaws, and administrate them? In my country we just vote for the people who take the credit/blame for the work a relatively static administrative system does.

Well at the point of time when policies are that to the left hard to imagine you will still have elected officials but who knows

> that to the left hard

He's talking about stopping funding for the British Monarchy, not nationalising the means of production. It's not a majority position, but it's hardly hard left.

Fucking lefties with their big government, wanting to.. stop paying the monarchy for breathing.

I've heard it called the "Small Change Defense". It's applied, not just to the rich, but to government programs that people complain are wasteful.

Sure, it's only 50 cents. That other program is only a dollar. But if you look at the federal budget, there are a lot of programs. They might each one be small. But add them all together and I get the huge amount I'm going to owe in April.

And even if I just pick, say, 30 of them, I could still take that money and have at least a cheap date with my wife. I'd rather have that than those 30 programs.

Straws are light, the horse said, but that doesn't mean I can carry a billion of them...

You're right when you say that the discretionary spending of the ultra-rich doesn't matter, but there are consequences to increasing or decreasing the percentage of capital they control.

If you e.g. diluted the S&P 500 by 20% and spread the new shares equally across the global population, it would definitely cause "something of global consequence" to happen, although I have no idea whether it would be world war 3 or a utopia.

And what would the S&P500 companies do with 20% less capital? How many people laid off? How many factories shut down?

Probably go bankrupt and/or lay off a lot of employees in a globally consequential way. I'm not arguing it would be a good idea, I'm arguing that it does in fact matter who controls that capital, as evidenced by what would happen if you redistributed a fifth of it in the dumbest way possible.

my guess would be inflation

>although I have no idea whether it would be world war 3 or a utopia

I suspect it would look more like the current economic craziness. The vast majority of the newly-wealthy would spend all of their new-found money on stupid shit and within 2 years a new upper-class will have formed.

Maybe the members of the hierarchy gets shuffled around a bit, but the system itself will find a way back.

You sure about that? It's giving roughly $1000USD worth of shares to people in countries like Somalia, with a GNI per capita of $310USD, e.g. probably about 3x the average yearly wage over there. It's also only a 20% dilution, so it's not like the existing upper class would go anywhere.

>You sure about that?

I was just making a pithy and cynical statement about how wealth distribution in general will just "shuffle the cards" and not change the fact that there are an entire class of people who refuse to acquire genuine wealth.

>It's giving roughly $1000USD worth of shares to people in countries like Somalia, with a GNI per capita of $310USD, e.g. probably about 3x the average yearly wage over there.

Yeah, that could start a war. According to Google the average cost of an AK over there is about US$100.

If you give someone $1000 worth of shares then they have nothing, because who would buy those shares when you might confiscate them again? Shares aren't worth anything in a world of confiscation.

I do! But I'm more thinking about the catering companies. And the parties. You know, stuff like that. The way that hundreds or thousands of hours of human lives swirl about their whims.

Also, do you really think so little of boat-builders that you don't think they'd turn their hand to something else than building yatchs, that would be good and profitable for all involved?

> do you really think so little of boat-builders that you don't think they'd turn their hand to something else than building yatchs, that would be good and profitable for all involved

do you think so little of boat-builders that you want to tell them what they should do with their lives? I imagine if they're building boats it's because they like building boats, and are more than happy that there are obscenely rich people there to pay them a livelihood designing and building beautiful yachts.

I think you're missing the point. They'd still keep building boats right? Except they wouldn't exclusively serve the ultra wealthy. Because the market wouldn't exist. Because people shouldn't be insanely wealthy. Because that comes at a cost to other people and is entirely a function of social systems, systems that we should make benefit everyone and not just a select few.

So if they're still building boats (presumably for no one?) Then they won't be the nurses etc earlier in the thread that this line of reasoning was countering.

It seems like you're struggling to imagine what people would even do with their lives if the industries that cropped up to service the ultra wealthy dissapeared. I am here to reveal to you, they would just work for other people performing needed services or producing goods. Simply put, there would be more for everyone else if the ultra wealthy did not exist to suck up so many resources.

Not at all - you've badly misread what I said.

You and one other person in this thread are saying:

- the super rich shouldn't be around because they employ people to do the wrong jobs; those people should do other jobs, and removing the super rich is how we achieve this important aim

- the super rich aren't required to keep those people employed; the same demand will magically appear if we remove the super rich

You are particularly distinguished because you say both at different points, which is funny. But I am commenting at one time or another on either of those points above.

"The way that hundreds or thousands of hours of human lives swirl about their whims" and many other little quotes in the thread betray the real motivation here. There are many more industries/groups of people that "waste" (under some moralistic definition I would disagree with, but it's a separate discussion) less per capita, but more in aggregate. E.g. most air travel. Or really any large entertainment-related industry (I love video games, but is there really nothing more productive the game developers and players could be doing?)

What is really going on is good ol' envy. Historically- primitive egalitarianism, as rational and helpful for building a good society as other aspects the social structure of clans and tribes.

This usually happens in practice, too; but for a large fraction (and maybe a large majority) of leftists it's also the poorly hidden goal - "virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries"

There are not many truly wealthy people in South Korea.

Oh, I'm not so sure about that. Personally I don't want to watch squid game at all, and am only slightly more curious about Parasite.

That's not because I don't sympathize with the politics, on the contrary. It's because I feel like I have enough reminders of what kind of world we live in already. I keep coming back to something Thoreau wrote: I didn't come into this world to fix it, but to live in it.

Most people wouldn’t watch that show, but well-off people would definitely read that Steven Pinker book to feel better about their insulated comfort in a suffering world. I guess people have different media preferences.

To Pinker’s credit, even he wouldn’t make such a wildly hyperbolic understatement of global inequality. At least not in public, maybe on Epstein’s plane.

The problem is inequality is the wrong metric. Standard of living is the right one.

I think the "actually things are pretty good" view are most of the K-Dramas you run into on MBC and KBS based on what I've seen over the air.

distorsion. poor people being exploited has been a common trope for centuries. Les Miserables anyone?

Ultimately the movie industry in Korea is made of very wealthy people parading like friends of the poor. very amusing.

It's a chicken and egg problem, or maybe a feedback loop.