Mildly Infuriating

Yep, that's about how I remembered it. It would be great, but I'm sure you can see how this wouldn't change everything (the third world is a different beast, which I just addressed elsewhere). You could get a lot more if you expanded to the top 10%, but that would obviously be more controversial.

That’s a one time thing, making it an investment isn’t accurate to what it represents in terms of value generated that was not given to the workers.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you had 58,000 dollars in wealth you'd pretty much have to convert it to income the same way as anyone: by building a business, or buying into an existing one. At an optimistic 10%, copying the whole market over the last century, ignoring all the volatility, that's $5,800 a year.

If you gave that all to the very poor in the US, that could change everything for them, to be fair. It's not like it's nothing, but sometimes I see people imagining that every problem in our lives would be solved by simple redistribution.

And yeah, it's stupid cheap to save African lives. Donate whatever you can, everybody, and vote for more foreign aid budget.

It's important to note that for this specific situation/question, percentages (i.e. "half of all wealth") aren't actually useful. Depending on what the actual flat numbers are, it would still be possible for "half of all wealth" evenly distributed to the entire population of the planet to not be a lot of money per person.

That being said, I looked at your linked article which actually includes the flat numbers which means you can do the math and see what an even distribution of wealth amounts to for each and every person.

That article claims that in 2022, total global wealth was 418.3 trillion. Looking elsewhere for total global population in 2022, I'm finding ~8 billion. Those numbers give us a per person wealth value of ~52K. It's important to note that this isn't a yearly salary - it represents the sum total of all assets each person would have. Also important to note that the population number includes children - something like global adult population would likely be more useful but I couldn't easily find that number.

So 52K is our answer, but interpreting it is I think a very complex question all on it's own. I have no idea if this amounts to a "modest" living or even what "modest" really means (PCs? Air Conditioning? Year round access to global fruit supplies?). I thought for a long time that if we could evenly distribute wealth that everyone could live a "good" life - but the numbers might literally not shake out for that. I still hope they do. I want them to. But I've never seen a clear answer. Also, this isn't an argument against an even distribution of wealth. I think it's ethically correct to evenly distribute wealth basically no matter what. I just don't know if anyone knows what the lives of people would really look like in that scenario.

I don’t know what kind of math you’re using,

Someone elsewhere here wrote it out explicitly, and provided a couple sources, so you don't have to guess.

Half of all the wealth in the world is ABSOLUTELY enough for everyone to live modest but not impoverished lives.

The global top 1.1% is like the Western top 10%, so a lot of people that you'd think of as ordinary. Doctors and lawyers, middle managers who have saved as much as they can and are near retirement. Actually, I'm guessing people's retirement funds make up a shocking amount of this, because it's such a common form of wealth. Most of the world's people live paycheck-to-paycheck, or a family-centric version thereof, which is what the other big chunk is about. Their contribution is literally just the items they use to live day to day, times billions of heads.

It's true, if we diverted even a good chunk of that to the world's poorest we'd have no humanitarian problems at all. Try convincing your average Westerner to give up a noticeable percentage of what they own to Africans, though.

It ABSOLUTELY is not. That extreme wealth is the result of extreme exploitation of poor people and societal structures designed specifically to benefit the already rich at the expense of everyone else and of hoarding of resources that are thus kept from everyone else.

No. I realise we've left the realm of facts and moved into a political debate, but it has more to do with some funny math. If exploitation was all it took, there's a lot of poor assholes that would be rich. That's all that's worth the time to say.

For the record, I'm still team eat the rich. You have to actually do boring homework stuff and go to long meetings if you want to sustainably address it, though. Otherwise you'll be just another leftist organisation that splinters months down the road.

Well, if it's impossible to measure there's not much point arguing about it. The other rhetorical questions I can actually address.

How many government subsidies do these elites consume?

Knowing what government budgets look like, I'm going to guess some, but not a game-changing amount. Most of their money comes from their money.

Would we even have a car dependent infrastructure nation wide?

Probably. Before cars there was a lot of rail barons, so it's not like they needed that to stay rich. As far as I can tell that sort of urban plan was a stupid idea that had broad currency in the midcentury.

It’s a bit more complicated than just adding up all the money and dividing it by the number of people.

I really don't think it is. I have a feeling this is futile if we can't even agree what numbers to use, or whether to use numbers, so I'll just try and explain what I'm saying a bit. If you still disagree that's fine, it happens sometimes.

Rich people don’t spend their money, they use it to outbid each other for control of existing assets that the rest of us need and have no choice but to pay them for. Instead of spending that money on things that other people get paid to make (the “trickle down” lie), they use it to extort us for access to things we need to survive.

In financial terms, this is called getting dividends. Billionares do about as well as everyone else, just scaled up. In the short term some do a bit better (whoever owns a big share of Nvidia right now), some do worse (Musk, Trump). The difference is that a few percent return for them is more than an average person could ever spend on themselves, and so obviously they live a completely different life from a guy who just has a mutual fund.

A cool explainer on why, in money terms, they exist in the first place. No, it's not because Musk is actually thousands of times better than us. Or even a fair reason.

There is plenty enough in this world to go around. That so many have so little is nothing to do with the amount of arbitrary exchange tokens that exist.

That's true. To be clear, I'm not saying poverty is necessary. I'm saying it's not because of the super rich (at least in the West). Nor am I saying the super-rich are useful.