Wealth and inequality thread 🧵
The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 —at a rate of $14 million per hour— while nearly five billion people have been made poorer, reveals a new Oxfam report on inequality and global corporate power. If current trends continue, the world will have its first trillionaire within a decade but poverty won’t be eradicated for another 229 years.
A billion dollars is 1000 millions. A thousand of them.
A trillion dollars is 1000 billions or 1000x1000 millions or a MILLION millions.
Really anyone who bothers to come anywhere near any of these numbers has some sort of sociopathy going on.
Wealth, shown to scale
Chart showing what proportion of people (at left) own how much of all household wealth.
The top 1% own about 30%.
The next 9% own about 37%
The next 40% own about 30%
The bottom 50% own about 2.5%
Interesting factoid:
If we were to eat all the billionaires in the world we would be able to feed a population of--basically nobody it doesn't matter that's not the point at all.
Trickle down doesn't work. No kidding.
My older thread about wealth and inequality including Canadian billionaires, how the more companies you own the richer you get, and Taylor Swift
The rich and everybody else’: Financial inequality in Canada keeps growing
https://www.tvo.org/article/the-rich-and-everybody-else-financial-inequality-in-canada-keeps-growing
One in three children and one in four adults live in poverty in the United Kingdom.
Those are absolutely flabbergasting numbers.
"The science behind winning a Nobel prize? Being a man from a wealthy family"
Of course. And the secret to being wealthy? Be born into a rich family. And for the parents before that? Usually luck and connections.
American Dream is really American Mirage
"Based on data from 2019, the anti-poverty charity has estimated that the 77 million “super-rich” people in the global top 1% of earners – whose average income is $310,000 per year – use 2.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide each in just ten days. In contrast, it takes those in the world’s poorest 50% – 3.9 billion people – nearly three years to pollute that much." "
_‘The rich and everybody else’: Financial inequality in Canada keeps growing_. TVO Today speaks with author John Peters about the billionaire class, deregulation, and why the workforce is becoming more precarious
https://www.tvo.org/article/the-rich-and-everybody-else-financial-inequality-in-canada-keeps-growing
'50 years of giving the money to the wealthy people resulted in the poor people getting no money,' is not a terribly surprising result. 🤡
"50 years of tax cuts for the rich failed to trickle down, economics study says"
https://mastodon.social/@jmcrookston/113464645313984642
What this report finds: Corporate boards running America’s largest public firms are giving top executives outsize compensation packages that have grown much faster than the stock market and the pay of typical workers, college graduates, and even the top 0.1%. In 2020, a CEO at one of the top 350 firms in the U.S. was paid $24.2 million on average (using a “realized” measure of CEO pay that counts stock awards when vested and stock options when cashed in rather than when granted). This 18.9% increase from 2019 occurred because of rapid growth in vested stock awards and exercised stock options. Using a different “granted” measure of CEO pay, average top CEO compensation was $13.9 million in 2020, slightly below its level in 2019. In 2020, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 351-to-1 under the realized measure of CEO pay; that is up from 307-to-1 in 2019 and a big increase from 21-to-1 in 1965 and 61-to-1 in 1989. CEOs are even making a lot more than other very high earners (wage earners in the top 0.1%)—more than six times as much. From 1978 to 2020, CEO pay based on realized compensation grew by 1,322%, far outstripping S&P stock market growth (817%) and top 0.1% earnings growth (which was 341% between 1978 and 2019, the latest data available). In contrast, compensation of the typical worker grew by just 18.0% from 1978 to 2020.
"The Middle Ages, which lasted roughly from the 5th to the late 15th century, was a time when a person's punishment for crime was based mostly on where they sat on the social structure."
"I thought this was the 21st century though"
- me, confused, checking calendar
https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/year-8/medieval-crime-and-punishment/
The Middle Ages, which lasted roughly from the 5th to the late 15th century, was a time when how a person was punished for crime was based mostly on where they sat on the social structure. In ways that seem unfair to us today, the length and severity of punishment could be much less if you were rich and powerful. However, the goal of the justice system was still to punish offenders, keep order, and even scare others from breaking the law in the future.
@jmcrookston They ran out of Earth based destinations for which they could trick people into becoming indentured servants and slaves.
There's always someone willing to totally debase themselves for the right price in an unforgiving frontier.
@jmcrookston The scales shown in this webpage alone is truly sobering. Stop whatever you're doing and look at this right now.
@levampyre they extend the reduction in poverty headcount from 2015 to 2019 out until the number hits zero.
Poverty is something like 8 usd a day. They also calculate 6 and 2 USD a day.
@jmcrookston The existence of this situation did not arise in a vacuum. The #DemocraticParty abandoned the #WorkingClass and gave full-throated support to a #Neoliberal ideology of deregulation, privatization, austerity and support of #Oligarchy.
Now those billionaires are so firmly entrenched in power that it is very questionable whether we can avoid losing even our nominal democracy.
Poverty won't be eradicated until capitalism is eradicated AND we build and grow abundant, care-centered communities for everyone.
Jonathan
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hcsch
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Hulk Smash COVID
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