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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
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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.
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…
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.”
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 carried through that 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.
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.
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.
We crossed that threshold so long ago that you can make 5x the poverty level and still not be able to afford a house.
Well 5x0 is 0 so yeah. This sounds like a good system though. Desperate for that Billion clout? Make sure everyone else has 200mil first.
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!
Are we waiting to hear it from the news to believe it?
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.”
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.
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."
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.
Who would be surprised that concentrating most resources in a few is the opposite of the common good…
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.
Rich people are also delicious with BBQ sauce.
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.
The kind of comment I come to lemmy for.
I’ll drink to that! Or anything really.
I’ll drink to drinking to anything!
Cheers!
🍻
Anything but your username!
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?
deleted by creator
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?
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.
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.
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.
He doesn’t need private wealth when he controls an entire nation for life.
but how to fix it?
Better education.
I would love to have that as a poster.
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.
tondo
circular art?
Recent high-profile acquisitions include Jeff Bezos purchasing the Washington Post, Elon Musk buying Twitter (now X), and Patrick Soon-Shiong acquiring the Los Angeles Times. A billionaire consortium also bought significant stakes in The Economist.
In France, far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré has transformed CNews into what critics call the French equivalent of Fox News. In the United Kingdom, three-quarters of newspaper circulation is controlled by just four wealthy families.
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.
