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====== Fixing the inequality of wealth ======
[[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Animal_Farm|Some animals are more equal than others]]. Even though this quote from animal farm was originally intended to expose the Sovjet Union, a similar line of fallacious reasoning is also used implicitly to defend excessive wealth in capitalism. No billionaire ever was more than an two orders of magnitude smarter, or more valuable than the poorest family in the world. Yet the difference in wealth is astronomical.

===== What is the magnitude of the inequality of wealth =====
The richest persons in the world have a net worth in the order of magnitude of 10E11$. The poorest people in the world have negligible net worth, or debts.


More than 500 billion people live in extreme poverty (below $2.15/day) [[https://ourworldindata.org/from-1-90-to-2-15-a-day-the-updated-international-poverty-line|1]]. At the billionaire side of the spectrum, the difference between income and profits becomes murky. For example, Elon Musk executed some stock options in 2021 that netted him an annual income of 23 billion $. The highest paid CEO's in the world are paid around 0.5 billion per year. 

If the handful of billionaires at that level would spend 90% of their wealth and salaries to relieve poverty, it would not make a significant dent, but rest assured that the pyramid gets wider fast. There is plenty of money in this world, owned by people that don't need it. But that aside, let's look at the scale of the difference for a minute:

**100 billion (the net worth of the richest people in the world) can pay for everything that more than a million people on the extreme poverty line would buy in their entire lifetime. 
**

**The highest earning individuals (0.5 billion per year) could pay for everything for more than half a million people on the extreme poverty line**
===== What is the minimum of wealth =====
We have a clear definition of human rights. The minimum of wealth should be the minimum needed to protect one's [[https://hrbaportal.org/list-of-human-rights/|human rights]]. The right to education, privacy, adequate standard of living, require some level of wealth. If you're below that level of wealth, and there are no government funded reliefs to meet those rights, you have a right to sue your government for human rights violations. If your government fails to help you, you have a right to seek asylum in another country. If that country doesn't help you, you have a right to sue them. But obviously hiring a lawyer when you're starving and looking for food is not a practical option. That's why governments get away with shitfuckery, and people starve or drown in the sea.

The minimum should be at least two times the extreme poverty limit. Probably more is more fair.

If the wealthiest 50% of the population would fund this from their own pockets, it wouldn't cost them no more than the price of a coffee per day.

===== What is a reasonable maximum of wealth =====
A very often quoted research paper suggests that beyond a certain level of income (~$75.000/y at the time) happiness doesn't increase. If it doesn't make one happier, it is not needed, it seems to me. Later research suggests a logarithmic scale [[https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2016976118|2]]

Even if there's no plateau to happiness, it seems cruel and selfish to build your happiness on the unhappiness of many others. More than 10 times the previously established (and possibly not completely accurate) plateau should be more than enough to ensure legal limits to wealth do not cause unreasonable suffering.

This means 750k$/year should be the absolute maximum of income.

Let's set the maximum amount of wealth to this amount, times the number of years in a human life (100), which comes down to 75 million dollars. Anything above that could be taxed 100% without any human rights violations for sure.

===== What would be the magnitude of inequality after the fix =====
Roughly, with the introduced maximum income of 750k$/year and the maximum net worth of 75 million, we would cut the wealth inequality by a factor of 1000 from the top. This would result in a certain significant amount of money to be spent on relieving poverty. I haven't found the exact numbers on this, but we can make some guesses.

It looks like the share of the population hit by these maxima would be in the order of magnitude of 0.1%. This 0.1% likely owns in the order of magnitude of 10% of all the wealth [[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSTP1300|3]]. Numbers in different regions might vary wildly, but I don't expect we'll be an order of magnitude away from reality with a guess based on these inputs.

Global total wealth is in the order of magnitude of $ 3.6*10E14 (360 trillion $ if you're an american). [[https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-wealth-in-one-visualization/|4]]. This means that if 10% of that is taken off the top, and distributed among the poorest, we could elevate //all// people under the extreme poverty line above it, //for their entire lives//

The poorest person in the world would then live on around $3/day (which is still no picnic), and the richest person in the world would have more than $2000/day. This might still be unfair, but I could live with that.


===== What should I be doing to help fix this =====
Even though I'm not anywhere near any of the limits set above, I can still make money move in the right direction. By consulting for people wealthier than myself, and hiring people less wealthy than myself on a fair wage, I would already be doing that. As long as my business doesn't involve exploiting the poor, I'm very likely to contribute to a fairer world.

When I have excess money (money that I can afford to lose) I can choose to donate it instead of spending it on something I don't need. From personal experience I found that this is a harder choice. For example, I'm saving for my pension and the kids education funding (I don't trust the government with that anymore, unfortunately). When I protect future privileges, while right now there are actual human beings dying of poverty, that seems incredibly selfish. However, when I lived rather far under my means, my happiness dropped and also my earning potential dropped. Nobody will be helped if I ruin myself, so I needed to set some boundaries of self preservation. I decided to live like I have a modal income (that's around 40k€/y before taxes in my area) put 10% of my earnings towards charitable goals (that's between 5-20k/y) and save up the rest for future financial safety. This feels balanced to me, and I decided that it's up to anyone to figure out which balance works for them. Als long as you don't own more than 75M or spend more than 750k/y on your ego. If you do that, your behavior is evil, according to my calculations. But at that point it should be very easy to stop and start behaving like a good person. For those that don't, we need laws.