In fact, this is corruption, which is in many of these cases endemic. We like to believe that the educated world has a level playing field, but this is far from the case. The tech world isn't representative for the world at large when it comes to being fair in this respect. (And even the tech world is far from innocent in this regard - e.g. Google et.al.'s smart dodging of taxation by keeping assets overseas. This practice is legal, but it is exactly the kind of problem where the richest are given an unfair advantage due to their wealth).

There are 7 billion people on the planet and the article cherry picks the poorest 3.5 billion. I imagine that there is little opportunity at that level. I doubt if anyone in the United States is on that list.

Also, many middle class people, such as myself, have negative total assets due to debt. Because 'wealth' can refer to not only money but general capital (including human capital, which is what I have invested in) I would not say that my total wealth is less than zero, and I definitely have a lot of opportunity, privilege, and comfort. But if I was writing an article for the Guardian in order to rile people up about inequality, I think I could not incorrectly state that I have negative wealth, and by net $$ standards far less money than many of the world's destitute.

Source?

The actual data on this appears likely to refute your claim:

Yes, that’s right: America’s poorest are, as a group, about as rich as India’s richest. [1]

That's at least the better part of a billion right there America's poor are wealthier than in India. According to the graph in the article, America's poorest are also wealthier than nearly all of China (1.3 billion officially, 1.5 billion unofficially), and 2/3 of Brazil. Not including the rest of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.

[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...

And I'm not sure what to say about your negative wealth debate. First world problems?

They probably wouldn't have been billionaires, but they would have had a good chance at becoming middle-class in Brazil.

Bill Gates, who I have a lot of respect for, didn't become super wealthy because of his business skills (although they obviously had a lot to do with it) but because the industry he happened to be in exploded.

Thats all fine and good. I have no issue with that. But it does point to what I would consider a flaw in the way wealth is distributed. But what that flaw is I am still not sure of.

Bill Gates saw the potential in the industry before it exploded, which is why he is considered skilled in business. This is pretty much the same with most super-successful business people.

I really don't like this attitude that success is mainly due to the luck of the draw. Sure there is luck, but it's the same luck involved in pretty much everything you do in life (you're lucky you didn't get hit by a car when you crossed the street), which makes it a moot point.

It's luck in the way that BG happened to be at the right time at the right place as an entire industry exploded.

That does not mean he wasn't skilled, it doesn't mean that anyone could do it. It just means that the success it ended up becoming was not because of Bill Gates but because he happened to sell a product at the right time.

Hadn't he done it, someone else had.

So no its not a moot point unless you make a moot strawman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett

“Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity" -Lucius Seneca (Roman Stoic Philosopher)

What is being argued is that they where lucky to be born in a society where their skills could make them millions.

I.e. they didn't create all those money in isolation, they made them in a system that made it possible.

Thats the point. Not that they aren't brilliant at what they do. Just that no one in that end of the wealth scale is that brilliant that they created purely based on their own skills.

Again, not taking anything away from Buffett, just pointing out that luck is a really big deal that doesn't get much air time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amancio_Ortega_Gaona

What did he do that was "illicit" (he certainly didn't inherit wealth as he started working in his early teens)?

I'm not sure what to make of the allegations of them keeping workers captive. But assuming the work is voluntary, sweatshops are not all bad. In fact, they're the fastest way we have to bootstrap an industrial economy in a developing nation.

Yes, these factories have terrible work conditions by modern, western standards. But compared to other local job opportunities, the factories are an abundant source of relatively well paying employment.

I say 'relatively well paying' because, despite how poor the pay is, the alternatives in the local economy are worse. Often, a so-called 'sweatshop' pays at least 2-3x the average local pay. It's almost axiomatic that a person would not work in a sweatshop if they didn't think the pay was worth it. So if they have workers in their factories, then it must be worthwhile to them. (That's assuming, of course, the work is voluntary.)

Once enough factories have appeared so that they have absorbed the excess labour capacity of the local population, the wages start to rise as the factories need to compete for the available labour. They also compete on non-monetary terms, through better working conditions.

Wages will stop rising when it becomes economical for foreign companies to move production to a cheaper place (after expenses related to building an entirely new supply chain there). If that starts to happen, then excess production capacity appears, which gets absorbed by local companies. At that point, the bootstrapping is complete and you have a self-sustaining industrial economy.

Over the past 60-70 years we've seen goods (clothes being a good example because it's labour intensive and not particularly capital intensive) being produced in a succession of countries. In no particular order, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam have all had their day as the primary producer of garments. Currently, they're made in places like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

So I don't consider sweatshops to be a bad thing in and of themselves. But they are breeding grounds for all sorts of abuse (including but by no means not limited to confining workers to the factories), which is a problem. So we should be pressuring corporations to ensure safe and non-abusive work conditions in their factories. We should not be discouraging them from operating factories in low-cost-of-living locations, or trying to artificially increase wages.

Not to say he didn't also work his ass off and have a great deal of luck. Buffett doesn't seem like a bad guy at all. Seems like a very 'grandfatherly' type.

Is it fair that some people make proportionally that much more money just because they happen to be born in the right country?

Again I have no problem with it happening. I am simply questioning the underlying "system".

No, of course not, but good luck finding a way to change that. Seriously, good luck.

I am simply putting my doubts on the table. Nothing else.

However, if we want a system based on something other than free enterprise, you're heading either toward Communism or royalism. The former scares most of us half to death, if we've been attentive to history.

The gray scale between political extremes is really so often ignored that it is almost scary. The real issue comes down to concentration of power in one subsection of the population. Be it a communist/facist/what have you dictator, plutocracy, or even entrenched political elite backed by corporate lobbying.

Yeah... that sounds really good in conversation. But let's pick it apart.

Any political system is going to concentrate power because otherwise any act will require buy-in by vast numbers of people. Imagine a committee of 300 million and you'll see why democracy delegates power.

The problem then is more that these groups are the wrong people (selected badly) or that there's not a clear communication to them as to what they should be doing. I'd say both of these are huge problems in our society.

Before taking from "the rich" while on this income-redistribution crusade, find out how many others they're already supporting, by contract or charity or responsibility.

Even not riding a train without a ticket is ultimately enforced with a gun pointed to someone's head, as is paying taxes.

I'd be in favour of taxation that works like air friction does, the faster you move, the more friction increases, reaching a hard limit at some point. Instead of the opposite, the super rich and corporations effectively buying loopholes.

The ultimate solution to such problems remains intact: vote. Lobbying and voter persuasion is quite effective, so vote out those who create/preserve such loopholes and vote in those who close them. For all the whining consternation people exude about such problems, very few actually direct that energy toward meaningful solutions; the super rich and corporations have learned to direct such energy and exploit it accordingly.

Not that I disagree with that part, though of course one problem is what a politician promises before election, and what they do afterwards, is often not correlated at all.

But, as you might guess, there's a catch. Any political system picks up inertia like a ball rolling downhill. Thus whatever direction you go in, you keep going in... and so unsubsidized egalitarianism usually becomes subsidized (as in the 1960s in USA and Europe) and moderate conservatism eventually gets more conservative as it did under Reagan. The reason for this is that, believe it or not, political systems aim at visions of society. The more power they get, the closer they get toward realizing that vision, which is actually what the people who believe in them want.

Conservatives and liberals, by the way, have radically different visions for what they want out of society:

http://www.volokh.com/2014/01/17/jonathan-haidt-psychology-p...

http://chronicle.com/article/Jonathan-Haidt-Decodes-the/1304...

A lot of people have made sex tapes, some of them professionally, but very few have made that much money from it. Partially that's because they were rich already, and maybe they just had a good manager/marketer/whatever, but they still managed to make a lot of money from something that is not typically well compensated.

I consider the responsibility of maximizing shareholder value to be a moral one primarily. If people invested their money in a company, it's not for the management to decide that actually they investors don't need that much return on their investment.

Thus most people with any life-experience want nothing to do with it.

They may not be interested in the straw-man version you've proposed, but your definition is not the end-all, be-all of what "social responsibility" is.

I see "social responsibility" as personal, which means that you are personally responsible for the society you live in; this is difficult when the government crowds out charities, and gives many people reason to free-ride.

Good to the good, bad to the bad.