this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
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The top 50 billionaires could pool 99% of their wealth without it changing their quality of life at all, and have enough money to quite literally solve most of the world's problems. We're talking trillions of dollars that could be put to use for good.
They don't because that's not how psychopaths work.
That's true-ish from a strict finances perspective.
But consider the island of Haiti. We could "solve" the problem of chronic poverty on the island by simply showing up with boatloads of food and clothing and other consumer goods. But it would be a temporary fix, at best. A real investment - just on this tiny island - would mean large scale infrastructure improvements. And that takes an enormous amount of materials plus labor plus the logistics to move it all and assemble it.
What we're describing isn't strictly a monetary problem. Its an engineering - and, to a greater extent - economic organization problem. Showing up with bricks of cash would be less beneficial than dredging their harbors and building out new power plants and fixing all the damage done by the last big earthquake. And that latter bit requires real engineering, which requires education, which requires skilled professionals willing to bring Haitians in and train them in the work necessary to improve the island.
And while we probably could perform a project like this across Haiti, by employing the Billionaire Money + Excuse Unused Capacity of global industry, I question whether we could do it globally. Not without reorienting an enormous amount of our existing infrastructure towards these tasks.
When people talk about "market economy v command economy", this is the kind of problem they're really facing off against. Not just "how do we pay for food?" but "how do we organize the supply chain from the farms/fisheries to the dinner tables?"
We could "fix" Haiti's problems with far less than we're currently spending to control their population. But that would mean building large earthquake resilient housing, energy, and transport components. And those buildings would divert the labor supply from making cheap textiles and agricultural goods. And that would mean people who buy cheap from Haiti's functionally-still-enslaved population wouldn't get to 100x mark-up the end products when they were sold in the US at American retail rates.
That's what we're really discussing when we talk about "billionaire wealth" versus "solving the world's problems".
Do Haitians get to live for themselves? Or do they spend all their waking hours making life cheaper for other people?
Connect your circle of thought. If we buy Haiti a bunch of food and deliver it, we have created the jobs and infrastructure to solve the issue precisely in the manner you describe. We have redirected the economy to solve the problem. You seem to take issue with the idea that the solution did not arise from capitalist market forces. Well no shit, that's kind of why we have the problem.
We've created an import market, which is good for folks who aren't Haitian who are shipping to the island.
But we haven't created points on the island to receive the new cargo (their port system is in shambles) or distribute it (roads still wrecked from the earthquake, very few warehouses or retail facilities to distribute to local populations) or use it (no reliable electricity or housing).
Just the opposite. I believe capitalist market forces are a big reason why Haiti remains poor. Keeping the majority of the population clustered along the coast and forced to compete for sweatshop jobs at the lowest conceivable bidding rate means foreign firms have monopolized the labor capacity of the island while denying them the ability to develop their own domestic capital (roads, power, housing, etc).
Getting construction materials to the island, along with skilled engineers to both rebuild shattered infrastructure and train up locals to maintain/expand on what was built, is the only real path to prosperity. And its denied to the Haitian people deliberately, in order to keep them subservient and to enrich the folks exporting their labor product off the island for pennies on the dollar.
Show up with bricks of cash, and harbor-dredgers, electric generators, and construction companies will be racing each other to figure out how to get them from you.
Construction companies run by billionaires aren't going to be lining up to rebuild the third world, when they profit from it staying demolished.
Toussaint Louverture's Ghost haunts that island, and guys like Bloomberg and Koch won't be happy till it's fully exorcised.
Nasser's Egypt, Mosaddegh's Iran, Pinochet's Chile, Kim's Korea, Castro's Cuba? They're not getting rebuilt at any price.
I'm not here to simp for billionaires, but, how could you expect them to be competant ebough to do the organizing required to spend the money in am effective way as to solve all the worlds problems. Like, really break down what you're asking. Do you think the softest people on the planet have what it takes? The governments of the world need to step up, sieze these assets, and use them to solve the problems of the world, not John Dipshits, grandson of billionaire.
I don't expect them to.
Yes, a global, unified governmental body who's sole purpose is to better life on this planet, would be a good start. Give them a trillion dollars and see how dramatically better our existence can become.
Really, another way of putting is that if wealth was distributed more effectively (i.e. no such thing as billionaires and nobody is poor), then everyone would have a common goal to keep things balanced, lest they lose it all to a handful of rich guys.
Most of the world's major problems literally cannot be solved by an injection of funds alone.
I'm acutely reminded of when that guy said $6 billion would solve world hunger, Musk basically replied "prove how and I'll give you the money right now", and the response was a combination of impotent sputtering and backpedaling about how it would now help, but not solve.
Also, the majority of that "wealth" is a price tag, not cash dollars. If you bought a baseball card for $5 and it's now worth $100, you didn't create $95, you know.
It's about what that amount of money would go towards: education, healthcare, housing, food security, environmental protection, wildlife preservation, social programs, etc.
We can solve these problems with targeted funding that gets to the root of the problem. For example, rather than simply distributing food, you educate and equip communities with the ability to grow their own. Even low-cost water purification in some parts of the world can make a massive difference to literally millions of people.
Lifting people out of poverty, even by having a universal basic income, would solve a ton of issues facing those populations: low education, poor health, food security, programs for kids/teens, more equitable transportation, etc.
We're not talking about sending off grands for a few thousand dollars or even several million. We would have TRILLIONS to use towards implementing solutions. And that money would continue to come, because these rich assholes collect and hoard money faster than anyone can spend it.
We literally have enough food to feed everyone. But there are people who will prevent everyone from being fed because having control over the food gives them power (e.g. warlords in Africa).
The bottom line is, you can't solve world hunger until you solve world peace, and the fact is that you can't buy peace.
Food distribution (and the costs associated with it) have always been the root cause of food poverty, but that's only if you stay in such a rigid, master/slave dynamic.
Empowering communities to be self-sufficient in their food production and energy production can very effectively end the supply problem.
Peace can only come when there is no need to be greedy, especially among a handful of billionaires.
When people's needs are met, and there's no reward to take more than you could ever need, there's peace. When you have fewer people with more power than they should ever have, there's next to no chance for war, either.
In an equitable society, peace is pretty much the default. Using money wisely can give you a societal return on investment that can come through no other means; it pays for resources, education, and technology to get us there.
But at the very least, use the current state of the world and the recent examples of wealth hoarding as an example of how NOT to do things.
The implication that all conflict originates in resource scarcity is incredibly naive.
You subtly dropped your mask, there, but I know enough to recognize your ideology. We're just a few exchanges from "all struggles are power struggles where one is the oppressor and the other is the oppressed, and will inevitably culminate in violence".
Save it for someone more gullible. I'm exiting this thread.
Bottom line: billionaires are not the cause of poverty. Ironically, the increase in billionaires is correlated with a decrease in poverty in the population at large. You would not be any less poor if Amazon never existed.
Scarcity? I said greed. The rich are among the greediest, and they are far from living in scarcity.
What I'm saying is that there would be no need for conflict if everyone's needs were met. Although billionaires contradict this statement, I tend to exclude psychopaths and mentally unstable people when referring to the whole of society.
The business model that created billionaires is exactly what causes hard-working people to not have enough to afford to retire.
Please don't fool yourself into thinking that a system that incentivizes wealth hoarding is not a major part of the problem.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/11/11/1052719247/how-6-billion-from-elon-musk-could-feed-millions-on-the-brink-of-famine
Literally an NPR article on the subject, outlining how that sum could solve world hunger.
Then Musk claimed to have donated $5.7B several weeks later. However, this money was not directed to the WFP
So it looks like Musk was looking for a large tax write-off, not a cure-all for world hunger. And when he found a viable place to dump his money, he took it. This wasn't about food aid at all. It was about Musk figuring out what he could buy for the price of a tax cut.
Billionaire -> max 9 billions Multiply by 50 that's a maximum of 450 billion dollars.
Trillion not reached.
YSK, the top five have over 150 billion to their name... each. The top guy has over 230 billion.
The top 50 combined have multiple trillions, and growing.
.... 10 billion dollars is still a billionaire. Or is this a comment that nobody has 10 billion dollars?
Or is maybe this a misread of the OP? By "pool 99 percent of their wealth" they mean the other direction. As in the billionaires keep at most 10 billion and the rest goes to better the world.
So the word tenbillionaire and hundredbillionaire was just a meme?
Yeah. Not a word. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tenbillionaire