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posted by
martyb
on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:43PM
from the I-got-mine!-And-Yours.-And-Yours.-Annnnnd-yours,-too. dept.
from the I-got-mine!-And-Yours.-And-Yours.-Annnnnd-yours,-too. dept.
The 1% grabbed 82% of all wealth created in 2017
More than $8 of every $10 of wealth created last year went to the richest 1%.
That's according to a new report from Oxfam International, which estimates that the bottom 50% of the world's population saw no increase in wealth.
Oxfam says the trend shows that the global economy is skewed in favor of the rich, rewarding wealth instead of work.
"The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system," said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International.
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Only 1% of World's Population Grabbed 82% of all 2017 Wealth
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Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 4, Informative) by fyngyrz on Saturday January 27 2018, @05:35PM (10 children)
Sure. If you have available resources. Otherwise, not so much.
Not usually to people without money, it isn't. You have, I presume, heard the saying "ideas a a dime a dozen." The difference a rich person applies is that they can choose the idea they like, fund it, and see if it flies. As long as they don't bet the bank on it, they can rinse and repeat. One success can account for many failures (I can attest to that personally.) But if you don't have money, you might get one shot at the brass ring. If you do, but it fails (which is pretty usual) then you're either broke or in debt. Done. Fini.
There's a reason almost everyone nods when people read or hear "it takes money to make money", and it's not because it's a canard.
Another critical issue here is who you know, and how well you know them, and what level of faith they have in you for whatever reason. Because without an angel investor or investors, or your own money, your ideas, and the marketing thereof for whatever monetary value they might have can only be built and promoted according to your means. Which is very often insufficient to bring about appropriate results, because, and this is the critical thing to understand: the world is simply not an assembly of fair circumstances.
(Score: 2, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 27 2018, @06:24PM (9 children)
Earn them then. I did.
And, yes, ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas, however, are not. And I did indeed leave "the will to see your vision made reality" out . Mea culpa.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2018, @06:37PM
Head in the sand shitbird. Ignore reality harder uzzy, maybe loan out some bootstraps and charge 20% interest. It is difficult reading the bullshit that slides out of a walking turd. You are a living, breathing meme.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Saturday January 27 2018, @07:09PM (7 children)
Your reply does not address the points I made.
You're still ignoring how the world actually works. You're still ignoring what the follow-on consequences bring to the not-wealthy for that one try they (might) get by scrimping and saving when it doesn't work out, as is most likely, statistically speaking.
You can earn, save (if you earn enough to be able to put some of it aside), and get lucky, sure. I did. I gather you did as well. Fine. Perhaps you can even lay claim to great vision (I'm not going to... lots of my later ideas did not pan out, so I know it was luck.) But lots of people don't get lucky, or have vision, and that's the reality most people face. One serious fail upfront is enough to knock you right out the game.
As for "good" ideas, this is also a facile argument. A "good" idea in the earnings sense is only a successful idea, and likely this has a great deal to do with marketing, rather than utility (pet rocks, for example.) A "good" idea in the actual "this has significant end-user value" is not an equal set with "successful ideas", nor with "well marketed ideas." "Health food" stores, for instance, make an entire business out of foisting off well-marketed, largely valueless merchandise upon the ignorant. Money in, chiefly (or wholly) imaginary benefits out.
Just look at that twit Gwyneth Paltrow; she make a nice killing selling stickers which she asserts "rebalance the energy frequency in our bodies." [forbes.com]
Her website states:
This of course is pure and utter bullshit, but it's a "good" idea economically, because a very large number of people are stupid, ignorant, or deluded, or some unlovely combination of all three. It's not a good idea in any other way, though.
There's very little fairness in the world. Idiots and cheats like Paltrow who produce nothing of value succeed, while people with very good products and ideas fail. That's the actual reality in which your "earn, save and create" model has to operate. The truth is, many times it fails, and catastrophically so.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 28 2018, @12:34PM (6 children)
to
First, we had an AC downplaying the role of capitalist - they just need to be really good at "exploiting" people. Now, you're saying that the wealthy person merely needs to be lucky (even though there is plenty [soylentnews.org] of evidence that getting lucky is far from enough). Bottom line is that actually employing people and building wealth via a business in a useful way is hard work which involves a skill set and experience that most people don't ever acquire. So why disrespect those people?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @01:30PM (3 children)
Yes, as the link suggests, being lucky (different from "getting lucky") is far from enough - it seems you need the mind-set from already having wealth, to be able to handle such a sudden influx of additional wealth.
So yes, someone who is already wealthy merely needs to be lucky.
Telling other people what to do is not hard work.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Sunday January 28 2018, @03:01PM (1 child)
Hmmm, "mind-set" [oxforddictionaries.com]:
So being wealthy is a matter of attitude. And luck. So how much of the world has the necessary attitude? I mean there's not much point to complaining about wealth inequality if most poor are that way because of attitude. They can always get a better, wealthier attitude. That's a pretty easy fix.
So employing people and building wealth via a business in a useful way is merely a matter of telling people what to do?
Go make me a supersonic passenger jet that's more economical than the 787 in fuel usage per passenger. Yes, you're right that was pretty easy. So where's my jet parked?
I'm getting this vague idea that you might not have a clue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:03AM
Yes, you have the money and hire a manager and tell him like you said. Then he tells the engineers to do some work and a lot of people to do most of the work. You have the money and you tell people what to do, it is not hard work. 80 hours of office job from your manager is not hard work either when compared with getting the iron to build your jet.
I'll give you a clue: Telling a stranger in the Internet to make something and point out that magic didn't happen is not an actual point.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 28 2018, @09:24PM
Can we stop a moment, right here?
The wealthy doesn't much value the contributions of the less wealthy. The poor don't value the contributions of the wealthy. We get all of that. But - actually getting a job DONE? It isn't the wealthy, or the poor who get things done. Nor is it the CEO, or the top university graduates who get things done. Those of us with a military background were taught that officers don't do shit. Officers tell us what to do, then we get it done. "We" being the various levels of enlisted and warranted officers. (Warrant officers are almost always former NCO's who excel, and stand out from their fellow NCO's.)
Telling other people what to do, and how to do it IS INDEED HARD WORK! Good communication skills are essential to the job, as is a good understanding of the job to be done. Add in an understanding of human nature. A bit of psychology might be helpful, but we don't want to get crazy with it.
Civilian life is little different, in that respect.
Those of us who "get things done" have to manipulate money, resources, and people to achieve goals. It's an all consuming job. The level of management that gets things done never rests. On duty or off, the mind is always on the job. We're the ones who get the phone calls at 2:00 AM, "The cops stopped me, and locked me up, can you come post bail for me?" And worse. The investors don't take those calls, nor do the average laborers, unless they are close kin.
Every job looks easy, to the uninitiated. Management - I mean real management - is hard work. Those people born with silver spoons in their posterior orifices may get to sit in boardrooms, and play gods and goddesses, and be rewarded for success and failure alike. Not so, the rest of us.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday January 28 2018, @08:58PM (1 child)
Read the thread, think about the points I made, and then you'll know. Presumably. You'd have looked less silly if you had done that first, but hey, it's your party. :)
I am one of "those people." I'm not disrespecting them, or myself. I'm talking about the reality of starting a commercial enterprise without any financial assistance, a circumstance I am intimately familiar with.
The point I was making, counterpoint to my respondent above, was precisely that it's not as simple as earn, save, implement.
That is not in any way a coherent summary of the points I made. Welcome to the "I built a better strawman" contest.
So as to what I was actually saying: Yes, luck plays a part in how well each attempt at success turns out, no matter how well funded you might be. For the wealthy, so does managing your undertakings so that one attempt doesn't preclude a further one in the case of your attempt not working out. So does marketing, which is often very expensive. So do the caprices of the intended audience / user base. Sometimes the quality of the idea, by which I mean, its actual (or relative, when there is competition) utility, plays a part, but sometimes it does not.
Given these facts — and they are facts — the wealthy are far more enabled to pursue such a path than those that aren't, because if they do manage these attempts so the current one doesn't blow them out, they can try again, whereas a person with just enough resources to make one attempt cannot do that. Now, if you'd like to try to argue these interrelated points, which, again, serve to delineate what I was actually saying, by all means — have at it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 29 2018, @02:42AM
I disagree that the follow-on consequences are that serious. They're in a better position to start a second business than they were the first.
It's not luck that casinos don't lose money on gambling in the long run. At a certain level of certainty, it goes from getting lucky to not getting really bad luck (and even that can be tolerated).
Actually, it is that simple. "Implement" covers all the concerns you mentioned. No one was claiming business creation was easy (else why bother defending business creation?), but high level business planning is not that hard to describe.
So what? Even Paltrow's shifty business is subject to these difficulties.