Oxfam: the 62 richest people own as much as the poorer half of the world population (legal, companies)
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It would stand to reason that someone who has been studying economics for the majority of his life knows more than you or I about economics. That would be a logical conclusion. The guy (if you looked him up) has been involved in economics quite heavily across the board. Even without the award it's clear that he's spent his adult life working in economics and studying to understand it better.
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You are missing the point. This isn't about knowledge of economics. It's about cognitive dissonance. When Nobel Prize winning economists contradicts rbohm's entire ideology, it creates psychological discomfort. rbohm can address that either by changes his views to correspond with facts; or, dismiss the facts and stick with his long-held ideology. We see what he chose when he questions whether someone who won a nobel prize knows more about how economies work than everyone else. It's essentially, 'I know what I know and nobody is going to change that.'
Did he have statistics on how many poor own cars or cell phones in that video?
About 90% of households have a car according to the US Department of Commerce.
Off hand I do not know the percentage of cell phones. If you hang outside of certain agencies providing aid in NY you will see lots of smart phones, lots of cigarettes, lots of tattoos, etc. The "average" poor person in America is not that poor. Of course some are.
Say what you want about the Nobel Peace Prize, but actual economists (people with doctorates in economics) are going to know a bit more about economics than the average person.
Now, I think some of the rhetoric about people with wealth is a little misguided. For one thing, the average global wage (and thus the $32k to be in the 1% figure) is meaningless, because it costs a heck of a lot more to live in the U.S. than it costs most places. $32 won't even get you a roof over your head where I live, but it's more than enough to live like royalty in many areas with lower COL. Once my house is paid off, I can possibly scrape by on maybe half of my current income if I decided never to retire, but for now, I need to fight for every penny. Wealth is relative in that sense.
I'm also not exactly leading the charge to rake people over the coals for being rich. Rich people should be responsible, yes, and some of them really need to adopt a more long-term view when optimizing their organizations. The move toward less stable work is also troubling, and that's something that hits non-rich people a lot harder, since they feel it more when they have to go a few months without a job.
The claim that rich people got their money by earning it is kind of silly, though. Some people manage that, yes. Most of those people are merely well off, though. Not super wealthy. Every once in a while, someone manages a home run that turns into billions of dollars, but most people who work about as hard as can be expected will hit a ceiling somewhere, because hard work can only get you so far. After that, you need some luck.
That hard work, too, requires the rest of society helping you out. Even the self-made millionaire profits immensely from our country's educational infrastructure and from having a family that pushes the values of education and hard work. Those with successful companies hardly do all of the tough work themselves -- their wealth comes from the efforts of plenty of workers who don't share in the profits.
I'm not saying that this is something that needs a drastic overhaul, but it's still just not true that rich people got there by entirely by their own efforts.
However, with the way our educational system works, too many people born with every opportunity to succeed still manage to slip through the cracks. Frankly, the bar for success in school is set pretty low; anyone who just pays attention in class and does the work can be toward the top of her class in high school, and through hard work alone, it's possible to get set up with a nice career out of college. Medical school is almost a pure meritocracy, and it guarantees a comfortable income. Most other technical degrees, especially advanced degrees, will get you a nice job if you have a little patience, provided you actually learned while in school. (Party animals who graduate with a "gentleman's C" in every class... well, they should have worked a little harder!)
This assumes a reasonably stable upbringing, of course.
The privileged kids who sling coffee for a living and complain endlessly about student loans and about how hard their introductory math classes were? They don't get a lot of sympathy.
Nor do the aggressively anti-intellectual types, like those described in that famous Bill Hicks routine. Hicks often spoke of a time when he was eating waffles in a diner while reading a book. The waitress went up to him and asked, "Whatcha reading for?" Hicks would then explain that he reads for a lot of reasons, but one of the most important is so that he won't end up working as a waffle waitress.
We don't have anything approaching a perfect meritocracy in this country, and there are forces that work to keep some classes of people down more than others. Most of us are locked out of the top 1% no matter how hard we work. However, putting in a reasonable amount of work early in life will still guarantee a ticket to the middle class.
A couple more points. I don't believe anyone who says that he or she could have been rich but didn't want to spend effort dealing with taxes. Life gets easier as you have more money, even though your marginal tax rate goes up.
Also, I'd add to the infamous quote from the economist that a lot of bright young minds go into finance because it's a really interesting subject -- one of the few intellectually demanding fields in which a person can make a good living -- and because work that leads to advances in more basic research is extremely hard to get to the point where it's a pipe dream for most people. A PhD in just about anything can get you a really interesting life as a financial analyst. A PhD in physics is more likely to land you a job in finance than in physics, since there aren't a lot of convenient ways to monetize basic research these days.
People aren't going into finance to be greedy. They're going into it because the alternative, spending your entire career as an adjunct professor, isn't very appealing.
Crazy. One year before it was still the 80 richest people, so the inequality is accelerating.
One reason for that exploding inequality they say is that 9 out of 10 big corporations make use of tax havens in order to avoid paying taxes. This costs developing countries where those companies are active more than 100 billion dollars per year.
Why doesn't anyone do anything about that? I don't get it, really. There are global trade and other organizations, which could simply rule that income has to be fully taxed where it is earned, no matter where, without exception.
Don't count other people's money.
How do you suppose these very wealthy people acquired, maintained, and advanced thier wealth?
Life is not a zero sum game. If one is wealthy, that does not mean that someone else must be poor.
why do you and others care so much what other people own? they went out and EARNED their wealth. if you want to be wealthy, then you go out and EARN it yourself. if others want to be wealthy they can go out and EARN the money. do yourself a favor and stop stressing about what other people do, and take care of your own.
One out of the whole bunch probably did it legally, morally correct, and honestly-- GROW up and smell the cafe!! Even if they think they doing it the right way- they so high up at the top they have NO idea what their investment are doing. JUST like Trumpy - he has many, but many illegals working for him-- but he is too high on the mountain to smell the stench of the paupers in the valley-- give me e BREAK Steve JOB was an intelligent man- but public money got him started the rules are fixed so we the taxpayers who funded his Co get ZERO back - and HE makes his shyts in China with slaves-- please go sell the Washington bridge to another ignoramus
How do you suppose these very wealthy people acquired, maintained, and advanced thier wealth?
Life is not a zero sum game. If one is wealthy, that does not mean that someone else must be poor.
Yet, they seem to be connected somehow.
One big difference today is that unlike 50 years ago life is a lot more complex. It is much harder for, say, an African country to enter into a modern industry because r&d requires much higher investment, not to mention the patent and IP mess that keeps potential competition down.
It has taken even China a long time to become a leader, and they had to resort to illegal means such as pirating, back-engineering, hacking, etc.
Most Africans are not even online, the digital divide is immense.
Say what you want about the Nobel Peace Prize, but actual economists (people with doctorates in economics) are going to know a bit more about economics than the average person.
Yes but they also have their preconceived notions about how society should be.
One out of the whole bunch probably did it legally, morally correct, and honestly-- GROW up and smell the cafe!!
Take off your jealousy glasses and view the real world.
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