Summary
Oxfam’s 2024 inequality report revealed a record $2 trillion increase in billionaire wealth, reaching $15 trillion, while global poverty rates remain stagnant.
The top 1% own 45% of all wealth, and 44% of people live on less than $6.85 daily.
Oxfam predicts five trillionaires within a decade, citing inheritance and cronyism as key wealth drivers. Elon Musk may become the first trillionaire by 2027.
Oxfam calls for tax reform, monopoly regulation, and income redistribution to address inequality.
Critics warn unchecked wealth concentration threatens democracy and economic fairness.
It’s less impressive when you realize that much, if not most, of that wealth isn’t “real.” The vast majority of that wealth is in corporate stock, and the value of the stock is based on a lot of speculation. How much of that trillions of dollars in corporate stock will ever be converted to cash? Who knows, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being only a small portion, and well less than a trillion dollars.
Whether their wealth is real or not apparently doesn’t prevent them from buying themselves politicians, ruining the environment and keeping everybody’s wages stagnant.
I didn’t say all of their wealth is fake. Much of their wealth is very “real.”
I guess what I meant is the reverse: I have nothing against people getting rich - even grotesquely rich - but not at the expense of everyone else, and not if you do it by buying yourself legislators that do your bidding instead of that of the voting public.
The billionaire class of today is rich because the billionaires evade taxes and manipulate elections in their favor. They became billionaires by making everyone else’s life more difficult. That’s why I want to see their heads roll, not because they’re rich.
Well, I have a problem with it, but that’s beside the point.
My intent wasn’t to take a moral position on wealth accumulation itself, or the accumulation of “real” wealth versus speculative wealth, only to point out that much of the incredible wealth of the people at the very top isn’t what I would consider to be fully “real.” That’s all.
I get your point, but it is impressive (or depressive, let’s call it}.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s imaginary numbers in stock or imaginary numbers in a bank account. Just as stock values change, so do liquid asset values, with inflation and macroeconomic effects.
Either way, the numbers represent the proportional value of current human society that has been captured by an individual. Billionaires have captured and withdrawn thousands, ten thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives’ worth of value just for themselves. Whether that value is held in stocks or cash is immaterial.
Yes, even if the numbers are at least partly fictitious (or even mostly), it is still true that a very large percentage of real wealth is owned and controlled by a relatively small number of people. The way we understand and measure value needs to change, because it is very skewed and not based in reality (our current system is apparently operating on the premise that we can create a seemingly infinite amount of value, but that’s not physically possible on a planet with finite resources), but the wealth that has “real” value is very unequally distributed and that needs to change, as well.
Well part of what they’re saying is that a dollar is only a dollar if it’s liquid.
And if, for example, Musk were to cash out all his stock positions, many of them would be worth vastly less by the time the transaction was done. Not only that, but without those positions, many other wealthy individuals would see their positions suffer and their wealth evaporate.
It is still an obscene amount of monopoly bucks though.