Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Get'em!

According to Oxfam, the richest 1% of the world's population is on track to own 50% of the world's wealth by 2016. Goddamn half. So like, let's get'em.
Starting with this guy...
0.01%. That's like an earlobe.
For real. 1% of seven billion is, what, 70 million ultra-rich people? Look, I'm not saying we should beat anyone up and take their stuff. All I'm saying is that we could. Easily. Here, let me do the math (yeah, suddenly I think I'm some kind of math guy): As I'm writing this, the world's population is 7,289,331,336. So one percent of that figure is 72,893,313.36. That means each of the remaining 7,216,438,022.64 people on earth only has to deal with .01 rich people. I think we can take them.

Above: A gold Ferrari. The seats are genuine
dolphin leather and it runs on Chateau Margaux
But that's just abstract numbers (calculated by my own remedial, at best, math). According to Oxfam's report, the combined wealth of 80 people, like 80 specific people at the top, equals the total wealth of the poorest half of the population. Holy shit, right? Now say those 80 people each had exactly the same amount of money (they don't, but let's just say they did), just one of them would have more than 45,558,320.85 people. That's just, mathematically speaking, seriously fucked.

So what's to be done? Well, I suggest level caps, but what do I know? Realistically, this is probably going to get worse and worse until finally it all explodes into some kind of bloody, 21st century Bastille Day. I'm not trying to be a pessimist here, but the people in a position to actually do something about the wealth disparity are generally not in the biggest hurry to do something about it.
"Yes. Totally. We'll get right on redistributing the wealth of the very people who fund our careers."
-The people in a position to actually do something
He means that literally. You
guys should probably run.
And seriously? I'm not kidding about the Bastille Day thing. The conventional wisdom is that people don't hate the rich, they want to be the rich, but I'm not sure that's going to hold out forever. Remember when all those angry people occupied everything? Exactly zero of their concerns were ever addressed. Fixing this is kind of in everyone's best interest. You know, before people start eating each other. No, really, I think we're heading that way.

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