11 thoughts on “Up With The Poor”

  1. The NRO article states: “The claim is — or should have been — rejected out of hand: One-half of the world’s wealth amounts to more than $100 trillion, which would mean that we would have to have 85 trillionaires walking the Earth, when in reality there are none. ”

    But that’s not what the article says. It says this:

    “The study found the richest 1% had $110 trillion in wealth — 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the population.
    That bottom half of the population owned about $1.7 trillion, or about 0.7% of the world’s wealth. That’s the same amount as owned by the 85 richest people, the report said.    ”

    So the 85 richest people have an average of 20 billion.

  2. Dave,

    You need to go to the original Time article – you know, the one they’re talking about in the NRO post. That Times article has since been “updated” and continues the following at the end:

    A previous version of this post said the 85 richest people owned nearly half of global wealth and the same amount as the bottom half of the population.

    IOWs, The LA Times still sucks. But we already knew that.

    1. I did go to the Times article when I wrote that comment. I noted that the Times update was on January 20. The NRO article is dated January 22. What does that say about NRO sloppiness?

      1. What does that say about NRO sloppiness?

        It says nothing at all about NRO sloppiness. To wit, the text for the NRO article’s link to the LA Time’s story (you know, the part between the href tags) says that it is a “just-retracted claim”. The last paragraph of the NRO article also mentions the correction (emphasis mine):

        It is unhappily the case that a fictitious newspaper statistic can sprint halfway ’round the world while the correction is still lacing up its sneakers, so expect that Los Angeles Times account to live a long and active life.

        The NRO never claimed that the LA Times didn’t print a correction, they pointed out that the original story was such an egregious violation of logic and math that it should never have made it to print in the first place and that in the current world, the original article will always have more exposure than the correction.

  3. Lies, d*mned lies, and statistics. Sloppy sourcing, careless metrics, all the usual flaws a good first-semester stats teacher will warn you against.

    I’m far more concerned with how cronyism is gaming the system to make it more difficult for newcomers to get into business — and in the process may well be preventing the development of wonderful new stuff we’d all love to have.

    1. “I’m far more concerned with how cronyism is gaming the system to make it more difficult for newcomers to get into business”

      Ahh yes, but the inequality warriors seek to perpetuate corruption by punishing ideological enemies while enriching their friends.

  4. I’d be interested in knowing how much of that was real estate.

    That is,”I own an acre of NYC!” is completely different from “I own an acre in rural Chad!”

  5. The problem with the poorest 1/4 of the world is not that they are getting exploited by richer people, the problem is that they *aren’t* being “exploited” at all, they are not plugged into the global economy whatsoever. If they were, even if they were being taken advantage of by “capital” owners they would be much better off. The developed world “exploited” Japanese labor in the mid 20th century, they “exploited” South Korean, Taiwanese, Mexican, and Chinese labor in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. As a result those countries climbed from a state of poverty with broken economies and broken industries into wealthy, industrial powerhouses today. Such “exploitation” has certainly resulted in the creation of many billionaires but it has also uplifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty to affluence.

    There is a connection between Michael Dell’s billions and the work of many folks in Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Mexico, and elsewhere. Many laborers in those countries could rightly lay claim to their labor being partially responsible for Dell’s wealth. Meanwhile, the citizens of Zambia or Afghanistan could make no such claim whatsoever. That second problem is for more of a big deal than the first.

    Meanwhile, this list of 85 richest people includes folks like Mukesh Ambani, a man who wasn’t born rich but built a wealth of over $20 billion by helping build India’s textile and petrochemical industries. His company, Reliance Industries has an annual revenue of $73 billion and supports over 25,000 employees, mostly in India. I fail to see how his wealth is undeserved or how it in any way diminishes anyone else. The truth is that he is significantly responsible for the enrichment of tens of thousands of employees (and the many more other folks they support through their economic activity). That’s how the economy works, that’s how it’s supposed to work, and there is no advantage whatsoever, especially not to the poor, to demonizing folks like Mr. Ambani for their work in enriching many, many more people than just himself.

      1. Not your typically TED talk indeed. It’s distressing that this information gets a lot less coverage and mindshare than the poisonous and naive opinions of “exploitation”. One of the remarkable facts here is how much benefit the individual workers are getting despite the extensively corrupt systems in China. Yet despite all these these things, despite corruption, despite exploitation, despite billionaires becoming even richer on the backs of their labor, etc. these laborers are getting wealthier, and they’re acquiring increasingly more valuable skills. As coastal, industrial China moves closer and closer to developed world status critics of trade and wealth will merely gloss over the process that brought about such changes, just as they’ve always done. And then they’ll move on to criticizing the exploitation of workers in India or Nigeria as those countries work their way up the development ladder just as so many other countries, including America, have done before.

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