Rich people are a threat for democracy, Oxfam finds
cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/57305272
Total billionaire wealth in the EU reached €2.4 trillion by late November, exceeding Italy's entire GDP of €2.2 trillion and approaching France's €2.9 trillion economy, a new Oxfam report found.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20260118190308/https://euobserver.com/health-and-society/ara3abf5ee
https://euobserver.com/health-and-society/ara3abf5eeOpen linkView original on lemmy.zip1290
Comments126
Not just rich people, also stupidity is a threat to democracy but how to fix it?
The stupidity is happening because it benefits rich people to fill the world with stupid people. Stupid, gullible people are the key to their endlessly growing profits and wealth extraction.
We already know how to solve stupidity. We have always known it. Education has been one of the core pillars of human civilization since antiquity. It wasn't the first man to discover fire who changed everything, it was the person who discovered how to teach the next generation to control fire at least as well if not better than they originally did.
Education has not failed us. Education has been sabotaged and dismantled. By rich and powerful people, for their own purposes.
First we get rid of those rich and powerful people who have set themselves against us, then we rebuild everyone's education and if we're lucky, we might get to move on with our civilization eventually. Nobody promised it's going to be easy. But it is necessary, if we wish the human race to continue, and traditionally we've been pretty stubbornly invested in that.
I'll drink to that! Or anything really.
I'll drink to drinking to anything!
Cheers!
🍻
Anything but your username!
The kind of comment I come to lemmy for.
Trust me there are people who even using the best education they stop being stupid is like it is in their genes.
Get that Nazi shit out of your brain. We all have reactionary ideas like this imbedded in us from growing up in western society. So, please, I beg you, purge that "it's in their genes (blood)" and "iq" shit from your brain. It's just a modern version of "blood and soil" even if you didn't mean it that way.
They're on the mgtow instance. All they know is Nazi talking points and misogyny.
At first I thought they meant it like "nepo babies going to ivy leagues remain stupid and out-of-touch," but on second glance I think you're right. Yikes.
I know people who have intellectual disabilities who are some of the loveliest and most caring people I’ve ever met. Intelligence does not dictate a person’s capacity to be a productive and caring member of society. Empathy, however, is a skill that can be taught to all but a few who are clinically psychopathic. Intelligence is not a marker of a valuable member of society - empathy and compassion are.
While true, they are the minority. That is not an argument against education.
One reason that people are stupid is because rich people need slave labor, so they set up a system where people don't learn to think for themselves.
This makes me think, there is some kind of "system creationism" philosophy in the far left that is not unlike the Christian one. Thinking that some all powerfull entity (or group) created/designed the situation by itself rather than thinking it is the result of extremely complex historical chain of events and balance between groups and environments. By extension it leads to thinking that somehow removing the powerful entity magically solves the problem.
What does destroyed mean to you?
Razed to the ground and the ashes salted, to then be rebuilt better.
Why would you salt the ashes if you intend to rebuild? You're aware that that makes land inarable for generations, right?
Um, what? That's not at all what I was suggesting...
You're suggesting we burn our respective countries to the ground, full on civil war and complete destruction, fracture of civil society, starvation and economic collapse, with no guarantees about who, when or what will step into that maelstrom of human suffering, other than your assurances that it will be better than what we have now.
Sorry, but I'm skeptical that you have a reasonable way forward.
🤓
Thanks for contributing, guy who wants to abolish democracy.
I can tell you've really thought through this.
The rich are the root of stupidity weaponized against liberal democracy, working people, and the common good.
Fixed by organization, innumerable groups federated on a main forum outside silicon valley's control cooperating on what we agree on in public and private ways as we see fit. With clear moderation rules appealed to a jury of peers to prevent govt, bus groups getting their hooks in and ratfucking it all.
Rich people are a very solvable problem, so let's focus on problems we can solve first okay
ALL the rich people, right? Including pootin and Pooh bear?
What makes you think that Pooh is rich?
Racists like to compare President Xi to a yellow animal.
I was just playing along with their use of language. Irregardless, it doesn't strike me as Xi would be among billionaires.
He doesn’t need private wealth when he controls an entire nation for life.
Actually Xi is probably the richest person on earth.
Why? Because China is the world's 2.5th biggest economy (2nd only to the US when counting countries, but the EU is richer than China and is often counted), and it's the biggest dictatorship (for now, since the US is at risk of dictatorship). Being a dictator, he COULD just sell parts of the country and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't be stopped if he tried. And when something can be sold and thus converted to money, it counts as wealth.
It's a good thing then that he uses his power to redistribute wealth, alleviating poverty and building infrastructure.
Again, let's focus on problems we can solve first. That means taking the beam out of our own eye before we go around criticizing the motes in others, or however that parable goes. We have far worse problems in our own home.
Better education.
No shit!
Most of the words ultra-wealthy are verifiably sociopathic. Capitalism literally rewards those who posses the least empathy, the most.
It's more than that. It's a feedback loop. Having distance from the consequences of your actions encourages sociopathic behavior. Power such as wealth is the easiest way to create that distance, even if you don't want to
Sounds similarly damaging and dangerous psychology as that of totalitarianism.
And so the fall to not only plutarchy, kleptarchy, oligarchy and monopoly ensues, but also already to malarchy and kakistarchy.
Thanks the corporation (and the unfortunately necessary sequel).
I would love to have that as a poster.
https://store.iww.org/shop/pyramid-of-capitalist-system/
I believe Plato pointed this out in The Republic.
He thought the richest citizen needed to have no more then 5x the wealth of the poorest citizen or you would inevitably slide into oligarchy.
We crossed that threshold so long ago that you can make 5x the poverty level and still not be able to afford a house.
0 isn't real, it is a social construct created by big math.
You add by 0 and its still the same... what?
You subtract by 0 and its still the same... why?
You multiply by 0 and you BECOME 0, the heck?
You divide by 0 and its... big not even a number just a concept.... sure buddy!
How strange that some Texas university was recently banning a professor from teaching Plato to students because it had too much "equality" in it.
plato sounded DEI to them.
This is amazing. News and communication in the internet age was supposed to be democratised publication and agency to the voice of the average person, and it is to a small extent, but for the most part society was just like
I was a longtime reader of The Economist, but over time as I grew older and presumably wiser, I found it was not what it pretended to be.
It loves to cloak itself in the legitimacy of rigorous economic research and neutral data driven positions, but it is really thinly veiled opinion pieces driving ideological neo-liberal economics. It's a mouthpiece for billionaires to persuade educated laymen on a particular brand of **politics under the guise of the certainty of rigorous economics, while practicing ideological pseudo-economics.
I cancelled my subscription a decade ago. I still read Public Library copies from time to time, but I find it obnoxiously disingenuous and dangerously lopsided with terrible conclusions. On rare occasion I find something ellucidating, I'm left to wonder if I can trust the source, or was it ideologically driven data fabrication or just a rare tossing the dog a bone for credibility.
I couldn't agree more and had exact the same experience.
In my case I was actually in the Finance Industry when the 2008 Crash happenned and seeing what was done (the state unconditional saving Asset Owners by sacrificing the rest, in constrast with the whole Free Market stuff I had been reading on The Economist for almost a decade) and their take on it, really opened my eyes to the complete total self-serving bullshit of not just The Economist but also the whole edifice of Free Market Economics (a skepticism further boosted by me actually starting to learn Economics - especially Behavioral Economics since it's the only "Mainly Science rather than Politics" part of it and my background is party in Physics - and deepening my understanding of the Finance Industry as I tried to figure out the Why and How of the Crash).
That shit is Politics hidden behind a veil of Mathematics purposelly misused in a way eerily similar to how I saw pricing for over the counter derivatives being done in Finance: designing models so that they yield the desired results under certain conditions and further controlling their output by feeding them with cherry picked inputs and then presenting the output of the models as "Mathematical proof" that things are as as you say they are, so basically circular logic with some complex Mathematics in the middle to hide their true nature as unsupported claims.
It's pretty insidious Fake Science stuff if you don't have a strong background in Science and access to the right information to pierce through it.
Unfortunately, it's true.
Your post is a succinct summary of the "study" of economics. It's just supporting a conclusion in exchange for taking a bunch of bribes and cherry-picking data to support your argument.
There's a lot of Economics in Economics.
For example Behavioral Economics actually conducts experiments to determine how people tend to react to various situations (for example, they've actually discovered that at least for some forms of medicine the price when told to the patient can influence how well it works, effectively having a placebo and even a nocebo effect?), so it's pretty similar to Sciences such as Physics or Chemistry.
The rest of Economics, not really, especially the stuff directly and indirectly linked to political decision making (so, Central Bank stuff, Think Tanks, Financial Press, "Economists" in the mainstream Press) - that shit is Politics using Mathematics as a Smoke & Mirrors to make the policy-supporting unsupported and unproven claims look like they're actually the outcome of a rigorous scientific process.
The situation is so hilariously bad that when a guy from Behavioral Economics - Richard Thaler - finally got an Economics "Nobel" Prize (which is not a prize instituted by Alfred Nobel but actually a prize from the Swedish Central Bank "in honor of Alfred Nobel" which they convinced the Nobel Committee to endorse) they didn't give it to him for his edifice of work that disproves that real humans behave as the theoretical homo economicus human model that supports pretty much the entire mathematical edifice for Free Market Theory, but instead they gave it to him for just his work on Nudge Theory which is all about how to influence people in aggregate to do more of what people in power want (so stuff like making the desired behavior - say, "donate organs when you die" - be opt out rather than opt in to get a higher percentage of people with that behavior).
All this to say that whilst most of Economics in the present era is a Shit Show of Politics passing itself as a Science, a little bit of it is actually Science, though that little bit is almost never the stuff the "Economists" in panels in the News or in Central Banks talk about to the public or politicians.
Capitalism is a threat to democracy.
But thanks for getting on nearly the same page, Oxfam.
Most -ism's are the problem, every hericarical civilization throughout all of sapien time has collapsed, destroyed the local enviorment etc. Inequality is the issue.
That's like saying "He didn't die from getting his head blown off he died because his blood circulation was interrupted for too long".
Capitalism leads directly to inequality.
True but inequality wasn't invented by or during capitalism, it existed in every heirarchy
Sort of., but not really.
Capitalism was invented by feudalists after the French Revolution, when they saw their grip over the people slipping and their fortunes (and heads) were threatened, so they needed a way to carry their wealth and influence into the new era where people were becoming enlightened and wouldn’t accept divine rule anymore.
Most of the same moneyed families weathered that period by embracing capitalism. It’s the same system, but instead of divine right, they lie and say anyone can attain it, if you work hard enough. But nearly all of them inherited their wealth, same as always.
It’s literally the same system and the same people wearing a different mask.
The sky also happens to be blue. That gotta be news too.
Edit: Okay, having read the summary, it seems like they have proved causality between growing economic inequality and democratic backsliding. Which yeah, most people could have guessed, but now we have a fancy bunch of paper that says so.
So tired of this tbh - I just don't understand how anyone thinks wealth consolidation to few could be a good thing.
Even if you ignore ethics and assume the billionaires are benevolent - it's just a bad investment to invest majority of resources to a small number of investments. Does any successful large project hold 99% of their investments in few projects? It's absurd.
It makes absolutely zero sense no matter how you look at it unless you're truly full in on delusion that benevolent dictators exist and are impossible to corrupt or overtake.
“But what if it is me someday!!!???” - some guy with 5 kids making $30k/year.
“Ferengi labourers don’t want to stop the exploitation; they want to find a way to become the exploiters.”
I have seen comments like this thousands of times, but I've never seen a single example of anyone genuinely expressing this sentiment.
I don’t think they verbalize it in the same way. But you will hear them saying they don’t want to raise taxes, thinking it will affect them with their low income. Taxes can be targeted at the ultra-wealthy, but low-information people have been made to believe they will be taxed.
The ultra-wealthy have made a significant investment into making the sentiment that taxes are bad be overinflated. They also have successfully invested to make a lot of taxes specifically target the middle and lower classes.
You presume to know what they're thinking, you mean. Have you never considered the possibility that they're simply adhering to the point of view that you shouldn't have to pay over and over for the 'privilege' of continuing to own what you own?
You assume they believe that because they're ignorant. But what if they just know their history? The income tax started with the exact same promise, a tax targeting only the wealthy, but somehow, we all have to pay it now, too.
The populace has every reason to be skeptical of taxes 'targeting' only the wealthiest among us.
I addressed that as well. The wealthy have invested a lot in pushing taxes down to the lower and middle classes. They also have invested a lot to push their agenda.
Small number of investments? Billionaires have shitloads of investments, what are you talking about?
I think they are saying that we, as a society, are investing into a small number of investments: billionaires. This is a bad tactic.
Exactly what I meant - each billionaire is our collective investment. We invest 99% of our wealth into a few billionaire projects which might trickle down to other smaller projects but trickle down is mostly a myth we can't accurately represent and control with our current tooling.
I think they are referring to the fact that, ignoring the personalities who hold this kind of wealth, it's just not a viable investment strategy for a project/organization as large as society to have all that wealth tied up with only a few assets (the billionaires).
Economics tells us that diversifying the investments (equality, if you will) is a safer bet for society in the long run.
I probably misread GP but hey, at least I tried!
Consolidation of wealth could be a good thing, but the people consolidating it are never good.
Yes. But it's the same logic in different spheres. Just as you wouldn't concentrate resources in one industry, because it amplifies your exposure to market fluctuations and creates greater uncertainty. So too, you wouldn't concentrate resources in one person, because it amplifies fluctuations in their decision-making policy and... Creates greater uncertainty.
I love putting the eggs in one basket.
Same way a single benevolent godlike dictator could be incredibly efficient and good thing but completely unrealistic and would never happen and whenever we attempt this we get millions of people killed and set humanity back by decades. It would be such an easy fix though - we all low key want it.
Some strategies simply don't work due to lack of self correcting and self correcting a few keys that control the world is very hard. This is exactly what's happening today - social media gave us the power to express the need for self correcting some aspects of our society and people holding the keys have decided to not allow this. Yet again leading to conflicts that have millions of people killed and set us back by decades.
We’ve been pointing this out ever since the concept of currency became a thing, but I’m sure we will learn our lesson this time and stop doing it. This can’t just be how it will always be until we drive ourselves to extinction stuck on this miserable rock, Right?
Structural issues make egalitarian economic systems difficult. Wealth and social influence compound once another in a virtuous cycle. Wealth has a strong hereditary bias, even in socialist economic models. And violence is historically a powerful tool for accruing wealth. Very difficult to establish universal deterrence against violence.
This isn't a question of people being smart or stupid. It's an elaborate balancing act that becomes exponentially more difficult as population size expands.
As a very wise Irishman once so eloquently said it: “People. What a bunch’a bastards.”
Hey, the rock is fine, we've made society a miserable place. The pack is calling me...
Not a very good actor, but seems like a good person and he's funny. He worked hard to be where he is so sure "the rock" is fine.
I think that this became an issue even before currency. It happened as soon as agriculture allowed for accumulation of resources, power, and wealth. I sometimes think that that was really the point when humanity took the wrong turn.
“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self-aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself."
So when are we going tondo what about this?
This. Has. To. Stop.
We cannot allow a single person or family to control a single news organization, let alone multiple. Anyone who thought that was a good or even okay idea has been, and continues to be, delusional.
They own so much more than the news organizations. They own the special interest groups, the lobbyists, the elected officials, the land and natural resources, every single company we buy goods and services from, the banks, the hospitals, everything. Slavery didn't end, it just changed its business model.
circular art?
Rich people are also delicious with BBQ sauce.
Well let's get on it folks
In other news: water is wet.
https://youtu.be/vZ9myHhpS9s
😱🤯
Great to see the workings of those keen minds. Rich people a threat to liberal democracy, who knew? I mean except everyone that lives outside billionaires colon.
No fucking shit.
You mean letting a small group of people consolidate power under themselves is a danger to a system designed to evenly distribute power? No way!
It's not that they are rich, we've always had rich people. The problem is that we now have rich people with enough wealth to compete with nations, and they are getting even stronger. They are now starting to cut their own deals with nations that benefit them personally, with no regard to the nations, and millions of people that could be harmed by that policy. We've already seen Musk manipulate Starlink to steer a war in his direction, and unleash his hacking squad to rig an American election, just so he could use the opportunity to cripple all the government agencies that were investigating his crimes.
And it will only get worse. They are approaching Trillionaire status, and will be even more powerful. How long before multiple trillionaires form an alliance, and build their own personal military?
Eventually we will reach a point where it will become impossible to reign them in, and then we will all wonder why someone didn't do something about them when it was still possible, like NOW.
There already are private military. Black Water and alike are absolutely private armies. But that could be expensive, even for trillionaires. It's a much better strategy to privatize the existing military and get it paid by the government. Watch it, it's going to happen!
Doesn't Amazon or someshit literally already employ a PMC as their "loss protection" unit?
Arguably long already there, when considering the bankers who control the fates (and [mis]fortunes) of all nations.
No shit bro for real?
Who would be surprised that concentrating most resources in a few is the opposite of the common good...
Screw Idiocracy. People reference it not understanding there were positives in the negatives. This is "Don't Look Up", that nailed our current corrupt leadership and techno-corporate lunacy, as well as ignoring what is right in front of us because shiny things are more interesting.
Yeah, this isn’t anything new. Literally centuries old analysis here. I guess it’s nice they updated it for the contemporary society, though.
I suspect the only time the US got close to representative government was the New Deal era. Most people just live their lives and don't think in ideological terms. The ones that do are considered "too into politics" and usually believe in reform because it requires less of them than the alternative. Anyways, how about that bread and circuses?
He also assumed automation would be helpful for the working class because he thought it would mean we wouldn't have to work to survive. I don't think he saw billionaires just breeding the working class for wars or organ harvesting and completely replacing their labor with robots. I guess he didn't really think about how low they will always stoop.
I would say that between the concepts of reserve army of labor and the global proliferation of fictitious capital he kind of had an idea of it but yea, maybe he couldn't have imagined how depraved wealth would make them (what you mentioned + Epstein's island).
You just made me imagine Karl Marx emerging from a frozen time capsule ready to do battle against greedy capitalists in 2026, like "Ok what are we fighting against now? Aristocracy in government, labor exploitation, and wage theft?"
Then somebody "Yes, ands" him before letting him scroll through a news feed, and he promptly vomits and just shuts himself off back in his time capsule.
No shit, Sherlock (c)
Waiting for another news. Like water is wet and education should function well
Now lets do another massively funded research project to figure out the next step a lot of people already know.. LOBBYING!!
Rich people use Lobbying groups to manipulate countries and ruin the sovereignty of the nation, have done so since Lobbying groups were added to Capitilism...
It's good science to challenge assumptions or previously accepted findings.
Usually these studies examine multiple factors for whatever context, then draw an overall conclusion based on the cumulative findings. This is then simplified by media, which then gets a bunch of "well duh" comments by people who don't read the news article or the research report.
Well duh.
oh rly?
Are we waiting to hear it from the news to believe it?
Poor people: "Well I guess there's only one solution really." Gestures to unpaid taxes and clears throat.
Billionaires: "Yes..." Looks at AI and fully automated societies before clutching pocketbook closer. "One final solution."
Fork found in kitchen
BREAKING NEWS: Existence of the fork that was and still is in the kitchen FINALLY PROVEN!!!1!!111!!!!!
I don’t think that, the difference that these guys and not rich anymore they are filthy rich. If someone is smarter than me they should deserve to be richer than me. But have hundreds of billions and etc. this is just to much.
No, they don't deserve to be richer than you
First off, "smarter" is a really hard concept. Do you think Elmo Musk is smarter than you? He's a conman and an idiot and I guarantee you he isn't smarter than you
Then there are people that have certain specializations. They know everything about very little. This means they are very smart nonbthe subjects they know about and well, not so smart in others
There are also the true geniuses, but those usually don't end up uber rich. The theoretical physicists under us aren't known for being billionaires
Then there is just the basic question: what is smart? Somebody who mnaged to make a lot of money? Usually that's not smart, it's stepping on others backs. Musk made a lot of money but he did it by lying and scamming (and he continues to this day)
And even then... Let's assume for a second that there are objectively smarter people out there, do they deserve more than you and I, just because of good genetics? Fuck that Nazi shit.
I want a world wide wealth cap. Say, 1 million dollar (pinky pushing against corner of mouth)
We can keep capitalism as-is, all fine, but when your networth gets higher, your income taxes get higher.. when you reach 1 million, 100% goes to taxes
This way, we have the strengths of capitalism yet no more millionaires. Without millionaires, a huge amount of shit that comes with them, disappears too. Governments on the other hand get a huge tax income that they can spend on free healthcare, free education, universal basic income, you name it. Nobody will be super rich, nobody will ever be poor again.
The 1M is a random number I pulled out of my ass, but the point stands. We need to cap how much net worth a single person can have. There is no explicit right that says you should be allowed to hoard money and art and networth.
Within that limit we can allow people to do what they want. What to buy an expensive house? As long as it's under the max, sure!
Those crazy ass houses with 500 rooms from oligarchs? Convert them into hotels. Same goes for those crazy luxury ships, make small cruise ships out of them. Ban private jets unless for things where it makes sense, like medical transportation or something
We don't NEED private jets for anyone, especially not in the age of video calls
Billionaires and millionaires are the main reason why democracy is dying, why the world's environment is dying, why things are as bad as they are, today.
Ban millionaires, ban billionaires and let everybody be as "rich" as they want within the wealth cap.
Agree. I’d even go as far to say, they can get filthy rich, but not at an expense of people getting low quality product, low quality of life, and in the process messing up the environment too, but usually, when everything is said and done, that’s how they get ultra rich.
Liberty until it infringes on the liberty of others
No they can't. Those are mutually exclusive.
Someone becoming "filthy rich" is requires the rest of the people getting low quality product, low quality of life, and messing up the environment.
I don’t disagree.