I find it endlessly fascinating that the Reich was so obsessed with technical legalities, however much bending they had to do to get them to fit their aims. This is a great example. “No, we can’t loot - that would be illegal. But as the new state, we can just take anything we want.” Priceless.
Yeah, and it’s been debunked. The original source is Oxfam, based on a report by Credit Suisse. The bottom 50% includes those with massive negative net worth. But that’s silly: those whose debt runs in the millions of dollars typically have earning potential not picked up in such figures.
http://fusion.net/story/39185/oxfams-misleading-wealth-statistics/
[QUOTE=Felix Salmon]
The second lesson of this story is broader: that when you’re talking about poor people, aggregating wealth is a silly and ultimately pointless exercise. …
The Chinese tend to have large personal savings as a percentage of household income, but that doesn’t make them richer than Americans who have negative household savings — not in the way that we commonly understand the terms “rich” and “poor”. Wealth, and net worth, are useful metrics when you’re talking about the rich. But they tend to conceal more than they reveal when you’re talking about the poor.
[/QUOTE]
More: http://fusion.net/story/44648/why-its-silly-to-add-up-wealth/
Moral: Study income inequality before you move on to the wealth figures.
The History of Rome podcast records a time when the Roman emperor personally controlled (IIRC) something like 2/3 of the wealth of the Empire. By extension the top 1% would certainly have controlled more that 1/2 the quantifiable wealth of the world at that time.
Barack Obama controls a lot of the US wealth, does that make him the richest man ever? Or is it just a quirk of his position?
I thought in the last few years we had managed to learn to separate a leader’s ability to access monies and resources due to his position and his actual personal net worth?
I don’t follow. Pretty much every living person has “earning potential” to some degree; to factor that into “wealth” calculations is somewhere between theoretical, rarefied and nonsense.
Just to pick one small point: I’ve been through two or three events in my life where very large numbers of high-earning individuals suddenly had industries and employment implode, and their “earning potential” went from comfortable-on-their-way-to-wealthy to scratching out service industry paychecks. Not temporarily: as a lifetime change.
I suppose you can fan up generalized numbers, but far too much of economic theory only works in such broad strokes meaningless to anyone outside the ec department or a national bureau. They certainly don’t mean much to the programmer or designer whose industry suddenly shifts beneath him, leaving no jobs and no future.
Generally, monarchs in Europe at least, although often wielding supreme power, were not as wealthy in land or coin as many of their subjects. Which was both an excuse for the mighty to rebel like the Dukes against the Hohenstauffen, or for the Kings to clip their overweening subjects’ wings as did the Tudors both for their own sakes and for the rest of society’s sake.
So mostly monarchs were superimposed on the whole of the structure, the latter including the ‘1%’
Even more recently with imitation monarchies, Victoria and Albert were fairly poor compared to great landowners and great bourgeois; whilst the present person, although far far richer than they, still has a number of subjects singly richer, not to mention the Russian Oligarchs we chose to settle amongst us.
In all cases their personal property, in marxist terms, and their personal lands ( estates ) and cash, need to be separated from * ‘their’ property which is unalienable to the Crown ( they can’t sell off Windsor Castle for instance, or realise it’s monetary value with a mortgage, now ) and [II] that semi-property which is completely part of the crown system such as the armed forces or the Houses ( Palace actually ) of parliament.
All these three need to be passed on to their heirs anyway, which circumscribes use.
Hillary Clinton had negative net worth in 1999. A Chinese peasant has positive net worth today - they save a lot because China’s welfare system is minimal. Was Hillary poorer than a Chinese peasant in any meaningful sense? What about a US middle manager who acquired his first mortgage in 2007 and then suffered a decline in the sale price of his house? He has negative net worth. Is he poorer than a typical Chinese farmer in any meaningful sense? I think not. Apparently Oxfam disagrees.
Crude wealth comparisons between third world peasants and first worlders are likely to mislead. Look, I trust such an analysis can be done in a serious manner. But not by Oxfam, judging from their past work.
Well, I agree that such a conclusion is nonsense, especially if a person is of sufficient cultural stature to have some ensured income or wealth-acquisition means - a washed-up celebrity can always write a tell-all book, right? A peasant whose earning days from physical labor are past probably has little such further earning ability. That makes them different situations, but to broadly say future earning ability counters negative net worth is too shaky a syllogism to stand much scrutiny. As I pointed out, there are people who earned pinnacle salaries for their combination of knowledge and experience, and in a very short time, had no more employability than a high-school dropout.
What? No he doesn’t, not for any useful meaning of “control” - the unquestioned right to dispose of as he wishes. Has a lot of influence over, sure.
This WAS the emperor’s personal net worth I was talking about.
I think here what we’re really talking about, then, is Das Kapital, what got Marx’s knickers all in a twist. The corporate lawyer or computer consultant who earns several hundred thousand a year is “rich” only as long as they can keep working. They are one car accident or stroke away from poor unless they have good savings.
The “rich” rich own (or have major shares in) corporations, factories, telecom companies, software companies, Apple or Google. This was a small elite who “were different from you and I” (they had more money). I presume this gross inequity was what kept Karl up at night scribbling manifestos. The other interesting thing about this level of wealth is that it feeds itself. Unless the person is profligate on the level of Michael Jackson, the amount they have grows larger over time, and as passed to their children, keeps growing.
So obviously this does not translate well to hunter-gatherer societies. For feudal societies, technically the king “owned it all”, but in practicality the lesser nobles owned their own estates and simply owed taxes to the king. The pope might have technically owned the church property, but in fact the bishop or cardinal also had an estate tied to their office. So there was an elite, and they owned a large amount of the productive capacity of the countries, and even more of the surplus capacity. In lieu of factories, we have peasant farmers who own their land but owe their lord a substantial tax - so a lord "owned’ a promise of income beyond his physical land holdings, an additional form of wealth.
I’m guessing that since the major crusade up to the turn of the (previous) century was against the robber barons, trusts and syndicates of that US business, that the aberration was actually the dissolution of these for the first half of the 20th century. But what are the statistics? Did we go from the top 1/2% owning most of the USA to the top 1%, or was the wealth more evenly distributed?
Not to be a troll, but the whole argument and concern about the so-called “top 1%” or whatever is completely pointless.
It’s like proclaiming that, “the top 5% of students in a school account for 90% of the A grades given” or that, “the top 5% of amateur athletes go on to make up 99% of all the professional athletes”. The response to either is “Well Duh!”. Those who are the most successful are always going to account for the majority of the whole whatever. It’s the way it’s always been and it’s the way it should be. Its the way it has to be! Any attempt at so-called ‘redistribution of wealth’ (one of the single most evil phrases ever uttered BTW) is not only going to fail, it should fail. The last century and a half has shown that planned economies (i.e. communism) DO NOT work. Ever. And they leave stagnation and misery in their wakes. Free market capitalism is to economics exactly what representative democracy is to law & order.
Is that an appeal to the Pareto principle?