return2ozmaWhat does 'eat the rich' mean to you?
fiat_luxIt's a meme designed to express dissatisfaction with income equality and the desire to fix it. What isn't clear to me is what qualifies as "rich". Because a US based entry-level fast food worker is at the 50th percentile of richest people in the world by income, after accounting for cost of living and other regional inequality.
It's also pretty clear from studies that everyone in the top 30% of the richest in the world will need to give up a lot of our privileges if we're going to address climate change, and I don't think people realise how rich they actually are. https://wid.world/income-comparator/ uses some of the latest research to help you find out, it's definitely worth a look.
And how much can we supply in resources to the bottom 50% by taking even from just the top 1000 richest people?
Maybe enough to make a huge difference. To be clear, I have zero problem with the concept of wealth redistribution to better achieve some kind of equitable outcome (that ideally isn't at the cost of the environment, which is the big reason that the top global richest will need to give up a lot of travel ).
I just think a lot of the people who are keen for "eat the rich", especially in its more violent forms, may not realise they're on the menu themselves when the issue is looked at from a global all-of-humanity perspective. And, I encourage people to really think about who and what is included or excluded in the definitions of "rich", what level of variation is acceptable to them, and what a sustainable living situation even looks like for the world's population if we had total equality. They're all very hard questions that I don't have an answer to either.
