How much of the world economy can one person control?

[magpies]

No I was asking how do you define wealth because I personally don't value it like it seems most people do.

 

[CRGreathouse]

So I have provided you with a model and data and references. Of course, there is still plenty that could be debated. I could still be wrong or exaggerating.

You seem not to have provided evidence for your core claims ("proportional" increase in poverty needed for super-rich, number of "very poor" increased by 1e9 over the last decade, entrepreneurs do not create wealth), nor retracted them. From my (up to this point uninvolved) perspective, you are being evasive. Perhaps you had information backing these claims in deleted posts, though, so I don't want to judge prematurely.

I'd also like to know which facts from Russ' post #14 you're calling "whack", and what you feel of Desiree's post #15. If you don't mind.

 

[CRGreathouse]

I personally don't value it like it seems most people do.

Could you expand on this? In my mental framework this is difficult to evaluate -- it seems like someone saying "I don't value pounds sterling as much as most people do". That is, in my understanding, money is worth precisely what you can get for it, and you can get the same things with it that anyone else can.

Am I misunderstanding? Sorry, it's hard to do this without nonverbal language.

 

[magpies]

Money owns you more then you own it most the time. Not saying that having lots of money so you can do awsome worldly things isn't great but I'd rather do something that benefits the world.

 

[OmCheeto]

No I was asking how do you define wealth because I personally don't value it like it seems most people do.

eppraisal.com says my house is worth $106,309
if you multiply that by everyone in the world you get $712 trillion dollars.

Ha! That must be how wall street did it. They turned the entire planet into a derivative!

Now all ve need is one central bank, mit one person in charge, und zhe OP vill be enzered.

 

[russ_watters]

You are labouring under a number of misapprehensions. I made no claim that the poor had to get poorer, just that there had to be more of them.

I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt because that was one of the two ways by which your claim could have been true:
1. People have moved from 'not poor' to poor.
2. 1 billion "very poor people" have been added at the bottom.

Since I wasn't clear on which you meant (or if you meant both, as that is very common with people making such arguments), I provided statistics to directly contradict both possibilities. Your second claim was obviously #2. Your first claim could have been based on either #1 or #2.

And again, I refuse to expand my discussion with you beyond this until/unless you address it properly. Expanding/moving beyond it is a clear attempt by you to bury the issue of your factually wrong claims. More to the point, the reason these claims are so important is they are core to the entire philosophy. If the poor are getting vastly richer (and they are) instead of getting poorer or having more poor added (however you want to say it) then these leftist ideologies fall apart.

 

[magpies]

How do you define vastly richer?

 

[russ_watters]

How do you define vastly richer?

I would consider a doubling a group's wealth or income over, say, a 20 or 30 year period to be "vastly richer". I judge improvements or declines by percentage change.

 

[mheslep]

Y... If for instance, one bought 1,000 shares of ABCD at $50/share and then 6 months later nobody is willing to pay them even $20,000 for those shares, then they are robbed.

The buyer lost money if they sold at $20/share. How is this theft (i.e. 'robbed')?

Because with a piece of paper in your hand that shows you own 1000 shares of ABCD, you can't go to the grocery store and pay for your groceries.

One can take the quarterly dividend checks from ABCD to the grocery store.

 

[mheslep]

From a review in The Nation of Kevin Phillips book Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich

http://www.thenation.com/article/gilded-age-ii
Year, Ratio to average US wealth
1790: 4,000:1, Elias Derby
1868: 80,000:1, Vanderbilt
1912: 1,250,000:1, Rockefeller
1940: 850,000:1, Rockefeller
1962: 138,000:1, Getty
1992: 185,000:1, Walton
1999: 1,416,000:1, Gates

I find Phillips unreliable, so these figures bare some checking ...

Edit:
Philips figures:
http://books.google.com/books?id=sP...hillips&pg=PA38#v=onepage&q=1,416,000&f=false

Phillips lists Rockefeller's peak 1940 fortune as $1.5 billion (1940 dollars). The http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl"

 

[apeiron]

More to the point, the reason these claims are so important is they are core to the entire philosophy. If the poor are getting vastly richer (and they are) instead of getting poorer or having more poor added (however you want to say it) then these leftist ideologies fall apart.

Aha, now it is all very clear. I have the wrong shade of political opinion in your eyes, and so I deserve to have my comments infracted and deleted rather than responded to honestly. Of course, that has been obvious all along, but it is good of you to come out with it now.

I see that you have not removed the infraction so you clearly still believe that you are acting with legitimacy in this discussion. I don't see why I should respond to you further under these coercive conditions and your continued implied threat. But I don't give a stuff so either way, so I will .

Define what you mean by vastly richer. If you repeat that a doubling of income is "vast" in this context, then we can all have another good chortle.

In a gaussian statistical regime, 200% is indeed a vast increase. In a powerlaw regime, it is nothing. Well nothing very much. You could double my income and I wouldn't feel I had entered the league of Bill Gates, or even the c-list of the rich. You could halve it, and I wouldn't feel that poor by the standards of my society, let alone someone from the developing world.

So define vast in a way that doesn't sound insulting to those actually in poverty.

Then when you've done that, answer the original point. How is wealth distributed except as a powerlaw? I've suggested a concrete model. If you can put your political biases aside, what model of the distribution do you claim?

This is a concrete question, so no ducking again.

Now I then also implicitly claimed that the slope of the powerlaw has not changed over the past decade or so in any significant fashion. This is a more debateable point. It could be that the powerlaw has swung in a way to widen the gap between top and bottom, or the other to close it. I merely took the null hypothesis that there has probably been no change, or slight change only.

So you can see this is science, not political philosophy. It would seem you might want to argue that the gap between top and bottom has in fact narrowed due to the success of the economic system and globalisation in bringing the poor bottom strata up. Well perhaps you can present evidence to contradict the null hypothesis. I would be interested (mildly).

As it happens, I know the gini coefficient of my own society and how it has changed quite precisely in terms of political philosophy - widening as the right has been in power and narrowing as the left has been in power. Perhaps there are global figures that contradict this local proven trend.

Overall, my society is also materially richer. The poor have more than they use to in terms of cars and TVs. They also have more debt and poorer health. But the question actually being discussed was the distribution of wealth - how rich can the richest person be. Again, the answer is powerlaw not gaussian. But I forgot, you weren't arguing for any statistical model here. You just want me to believe that free market capitalism is making the world a better place for everyone (as opposed to the rampant exploitation of cheap fossil fuels with its one-time eroei sweet deal being the prime source of the riches).

I'm sure you will continue not to answer these substantive points as in the past, but instead select some isolated quote, fire a quick retort, then disappear.

But before you go, please remove that unjust, politically-motivated, infraction for the good name of the ideologies you happen to favour.

 

[apeiron]

One of Russ's complaints is that it is mistaken to presume that population growth is about the addition of the very poor (ie: those at or below poverty line). But where are the stats to suggest otherwise?

Instead, this is a typical summary from those who research these issues.

According to the 2006 Revision, the world population is expected to rise in the next 43 years by 2.5 billion, to reach a total of 9.2 billion in 2050. The increase is equivalent to the total world population in 1950. Essentially all of the growth will take place in the less developed countries, and will be concentrated among the poorest populations in urban areas.

By contrast, the overall population of the more developed countries is likely to show little change over the next 43 years, remaining at about 1.2 billion. Fertility is below replacement level in all 45 developed countries or areas, as well as in 28 developing countries including China. The population of developed regions is ageing and would actually decline were it not for migration. The populations of Germany, Italy, Japan and most of the successor states of the former Soviet Union are expected to be lower in 2050 than they are today.

http://www.unfpa.org/pds/trends.htm

My main contention from the start is that wealth distribution follows a powerlaw. The secondary observation was that to maintain a powerlaw in an expanding system, any increase at the top has to be matched by an increase at the bottom. Simple physics really.

Russ has yet to address either of these two points with any clarity.

He provided links to show GPD following a geometric curve (yes, the system is indeed expanding) and another page which he claimed showed dramatic evidence of a drop in poverty over the past decade.

http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats

On inspection, this showed that poverty levels have remained essentially flat, once you take China out of the equation. And it is correct to take out China because China has become tied to the Western consumer machine (they make it cheaply for us now while despoiling their landscape and quietly becoming owners of their customers - think the US can afford China yanking away the props under the dollar).

Otherwise, the whole page is evidence of powerlaw wealth distribution. Which is not a political point, simply a fact.

More than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where income differentials are widening

The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income

Number of children in the world 2.2 billion - Number in poverty 1 billion

In 2005, one out of three urban dwellers (approximately 1 billion people) was living in slum conditions.

In 2005, the wealthiest 20% of the world accounted for 76.6% of total private consumption. The poorest fifth just 1.5%:

The poorest 10% accounted for just 0.5% and the wealthiest 10% accounted for 59% of all the consumption:

The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).

about 0.13% of the world’s population controlled 25% of the world’s financial assets in 2004.Source 21

The wealthiest nation on Earth has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation.

In 1960, the 20% of the world’s people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% — in 1997, 74 times as much.Source 26

Low income countries (2.4 billion people) accounted for just $1.6 trillion of global GDP (3.3%)

 

[Evo]

This thread is too full of misinformation and has gone off topic.

Closed.