Interesting factoid here. Told to me recently by a co-worker. I don’t have a cite, so take it FWIW.
He said he had recently read that the 62 richest individual people on Earth control as much assets as the bottom half of the human population, 3.5 billion people.
IOW, the median point on the asset scale is just 62/7,000,000,000ths of the way down from the tippy top.
I don’t know how true this is, and how it may conflate royal wealth with commercial wealth. But it’s an eye-catching factoid.
On the drug abuse issue …
I have read some pretty amazing numbers on alcohol consumption in the US back around the late 1800s & early 1900s leading up to Prohibition. Numbers 5 or 10x higher per capita than today. And us now in a fairly health-conscious era where the percentage of teetotal folks is (I think) greater than its ever been.
I wonder how much we have actually had an increase in self-destructive intoxication and how much we’ve simply redirected what would historically have been millions of drunks to now use powders & pills & injectables instead?
Article here FWIW.
Actual definition of condescending:
con·de·scend·ing
ˌkändəˈsendiNG/Submit
adjective
having or showing a feeling of patronizing superiority.
“she thought the teachers were arrogant and condescending”
synonyms: patronizing, supercilious, superior, snobbish, snobby, disdainful, lofty,
It’s still something available for use by anyone of any political persuasion.
I’m not really into politicizing basic language.
I think your math is a little off.
The top 62 individuals own as much as the bottom 3.5 billion. But the top 3.5 billion (minus 62) people probably own several times what the top 62 people own.
According to the article the top 1% own more than everyone else combined. That is as close as it comes to answering the particular question you pose.
When someone says something that you don’t want to hear you will believe that they are being condescending if someone suggests it, regardless of how little grasp on the actual meaning of the word the speaker has.
It’s a tired trope from the right in our era.
The left and right just like different flavors of condescension - there is nothing in this that I can see really worth sidetracking this thread over.
Perhaps a thread in the pit with this topic would be a good time, maybe in IMHO - I don’t really know; I barely even care to be honest.
Whatever but I’m not into false equivalencies.
Quite right. :smack: Thanks.
Now *that *is a valid definition of median, unlike my earlier effort. 1% of 7 billion is 70 million. A big pile of people no doubt. But still the median is (roughly) 1% of the way down from the tippy top.
Median would be the 3.5 billionth spot. I think you mean mean.
Here’s a really interesting theory. If true, it’s kinda fucked up.
Racial stereotypes may explain why rates of opiod abuse are increasing so much among whites.
Pretty horrific if true.
What’s most interesting to me is that for the 25-34 yo age group we see very little change from 2002 to 2014 in either the Black or Hispanic rates. They trend up & down and back up, but across a narrow range. Meanwhile it’s a pretty fair bet their incidence of actual real pain hasn’t changed much over that time interval, nor has their incidence of all-flavors drug abuse.
So the docs aren’t prescribing more opioids for that population and that population isn’t taking more opioids whether illicit or legit.
At the same time over in Whiteyville the opioid overdoses have gone up ~2.5x. Again, as with the other ethnic groups, the incidence of real pain is almost certainly unchanged.
What *has *changed, and changed bigtime, is some combo of doc’s prescribing habits and white folks’ drug seeking behavior.
This leads me to the soft conclusion that black, brown, and white legit pain is controlled about as well or as badly as it ever was. There’s no way to tease more about that issue from the facts provided. Note I’m not saying it’s treated equally well between the three groups. Just that each group’s experience hasn’t changed.
But clearly a huge new arena has opened for white drug seeking behavior funneling legit opioid meds via docs into abusers. An avenue which the other groups either are not pursuing, or are effectively locked out of.
The article has no objective info about other changes in Black and Hispanic drug consumption or overdose experience. It may simply be fashion that, say, Hispanics prefer heroin & Blacks prefer cocaine, whereas Whitey likes prescription opioids.
ISTR reading some legit scholarly work on this a couple years ago that something like 2% of physicians were writing like 90% of the scripts for opioids. IOW, licensed pain clinics that were really just wholesalers to networks of small-time drug pushers. It was this discovery that really put a bee in the FDA’s bonnet to clamp down on rogue prescribers and sloppy pharmacy ops.
It would be interesting to update this article with data from 2015 when the FDA’s changes have had time to take effect.