For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
#1584938
Philanthropy giving money to pet causes (however worthwhile) or creating “foundations” so that your name lives on after your death is not the answer.

Are you not staggered by the magnitude of that disparity how can we call ourselves civilised?
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#1584943
I think that trying to solve problems at such extremes, bringing together the very richest and the very poorest, is very difficult although worthy.

I'd like to see the simpler problems (which the bigger problems ^^ have as foundations) solved. Such as people in this country who despite working full time still have to rely on benefits to pay rent or for school meals and cannot afford to live what I would think should be a comfortable life. Increase their pay, moderate costs and stop the state having to subsidise employee income through benefits.
Last edited by JoeC on Thu Jan 18, 2018 2:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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#1584948
I think you have to take into account how many peoples jobs, pensions and savings have these individuals been responsible for. How many families have been helped indirectly? How much tax has been created both directly & indirectly by them. It isn't about pet causes, these people, and others at a much smaller scale are the people who create the jobs and wealth for others and create a whole chain reaction of growth that spreads far and wide.

How many jobs have been created from the likes of Bill gates and Steve Jobs? Right on down from the current board at Apple to the people selling iphone cases in the market. Thousands of people worldwide make money selling on Amazon thanks to Bezos or on ebay thanks to Omidyar. Alibaba and thousands of Chinese manufacturers & the people who work there owe much to the success of these two sites alone.

Yes there is a huge gap between these mega rich and the poor but, again, the gap is much wider elsewhere. The average poor person in Africa or Asia would give anything to live like the average poor person in the west. The average rich person in these same places probably has a much more opulent lifestyle than the average rich person in the west also.

You say the rich giving away large amount of their wealth isn't the answer, so what is? Tax them so much you stifle that growth?
By johnm
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1584950
It is rarely wise to base policy decisions on statistical outliers, nor is the simple numerical disparity the whole story. As ever it's a complex socio-economic issue, with cultural components as well.

All we can do is try to live up to the standards of morality that underpin civilised behaviour and try to ensure they are widely accepted and enforced.

We cannot hope to solve all of the greed, stupidity and corruption in the world but we can seek to promote altruism, rational behaviour and honesty.

The country called the UK that I was born into had a reputation for honesty and good manners. Such attributes were far from universal amongst citizens or institutions, but they were respected and failures to live up to them were regretted and in some cases punished. It would be good if we could get back to promoting such values effectively.
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#1584953
Such as people in this country who despite working full time still have to rely on benefits to pay rent or for school meals and cannot afford to live what I would think should be a comfortable life.


I agree with this, for it to happen though would involve both an increase in minimum wage and a decrease in house prices. Both of which would have knock on effects that could potentially make other people worse off.
#1584991
You could strip a billionaire of his riches, give him and a person on benefits, say, £100 000 each and I'd bet that the billionaire after ten years or so would be mega rich again whilst the other would have squandered his/her lot and be back on hand outs. It seems to be a mortal sin for any one to have some form of savings, or to have done well for themselves in this day and age..
#1585016
felixflyer wrote:I think you have to take into account how many peoples jobs, pensions and savings have these individuals been responsible for.


Senator Sanders touches on this in the article cited in the original post:-
In the United States, Jeff Bezos – founder of Amazon, and currently the world’s wealthiest person – has a net worth of more than $100bn. He owns at least four mansions, together worth many tens of millions of dollars. As if that weren’t enough, he is spending $42m on the construction of a clock inside a mountain in Texas that will supposedly run for 10,000 years. But, in Amazon warehouses across the country, his employees often work long, gruelling hours and earn wages so low they rely on Medicaid, food stamps and public housing paid for by US taxpayers.


How can we even begin to believe that this is just? No-one is saying that absolute equality is the way forward, but the disparity between rich and poor is getting worse rather than better. I agree with JohnM - it's not simple.... but that doesn't mean it's acceptable.
#1585020
But they are not forced to work there. There is a lot of talk about low paid workers at Amazon but we are talking about the unskilled pickers and packers here. It is a job for students and those who really can't or don't want to do anything else. Many companies with warehousing employ these kinds of workers and it will only ever pay the minimum wage.

You wouldn't believe it from the media reports about Amazon but they also employ higher level staff and will promote those warehouse staff that show aptitude into supervisor and managerial roles. They also have large offices full of happy, well paid staff as well as the warehousing. Then we have the thousands of people working happily as self employed suppliers and traders thanks to Amazons fulfilment and marketplace system. This has also allowed many small local businesses to grow and reach a wider market.

All we can do is make sure that those who want to work and learn and progress in life are not held back from doing so by money or social standing and the rest is up to them. I think we do that quite well. More needs to be done in terms of childcare for working parents but the growing number of home based opportunities such as the above helps out there.
By johnm
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1585024
It is tricky this isn't it?

It seems to me that there is no reason why warehouse workers couldn't be paid a little more, but there's a balancing act. Is it better to have people in work even if that takes a government subsidy? If the going rate for warehousemen is put up 30% at Amazon who can afford it, will that put weaker businesses out of the game thus creating unemployment and other problems. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I confess to be ambivalent about Amazon. They have radically changed the retail game, but not without cost. Close to home my wife self published a specialist book. She can make about £5 a copy through most outlets, except Amazon, where every copy sold costs her money because of Amazon's rapacious margins.
#1585059
The level of wages isn't too low, It's the threshold of taxation that's the problem !

Our crazy, complex tax-system is unfit for purpose, a system that simultaneously can tax with one hand and give benefits with the other hand, to the same citizen.....the whole Government machine keeps vast numbers of people in a job and as we know, turkeys don't vote for Christmas. Therefore, the party in power has a huge incentive to keep the Civil Service "on-side" , as their voting block effectively determines which political party is in power.

A brave and morally-strong government would dramatically simplify administration to the extent of halving the need for public-service administrators. That would enable the lower-paid to have much reduced taxes.

Amazon:- simple answer....sell direct or buy direct. I have found that buying off a particular company's own website was 3% cheaper than buying from them via Amazon.
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By Pete L
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1585081
Amazon / FB etc are rent seekers - it is possible to organize these things as co-operative services and the rental profit returns to the users. Like government you will still get abuse through complacency - Crystal Methodist, DLOs, building society failures etc - and low grade corruption as happens in council services - somehow mates get earlier in the queue at the margins or artificial barriers get created (think french villages, tube drivers, barristers, surgeons, Swanwick ATCOs).

Rent seeking is as far as I can tell always freeloading - efficiency is possible without it.

The variations in income are another example of power series behaviour. It's the same reason large cities happen. The absolute variation is an issue - Denmark seems to mostly cope without it - and the hollowing out of the middle incomes is a worry.

It does seem like a not completely accidental desire to split the world into insecure drones - you never have a choice whether to work or not; or what work to do; or a house which doesn't depend on working - and secure transnational plutocrats who can always find someone who will do the job for less.

The problem with providing security is to whom. If you have an isolated village or small island off the coast of Europe, you can pretty much decide how to split the cake so that everyone has reasonable security and relative fairness in exchange for making the contribution to the next generation that they can, leavened with the odd beer.

The fairness argument over migration is similar to the argument over free trade. What most people overlook is that until there was relative equality of arms in trade, the best tactic is generally to keep the barriers up until your own economy is strong enough.

For migration, the equivalent is to improve the places people are coming from.
#1586069
So.... 82% of the new wealth last year went to the richest 1% whilst the poorest half got nothing. OK the source isn't independent, but even so how is this defendable?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/ ... says-oxfam
#1586099
No. But...

https://www.positive.news/2017/perspective/28150/reported-decline-global-poverty/

“If you’re over the age of 18, you probably grew up with the story of how the world is divided into the rich and the poor. But your opinions about global inequality really depend on where you’re standing.

That story was forged during a time of real global inequality. In 1970, around 60 per cent of the world’s 3.7 billion people lived in extreme poverty. If you plotted the world’s income on a distribution curve, it looked like camel humps. There was a small, high income group of countries up at the front, and then a bigger low income group at the back.

For decades, the language that we created to describe this world (first vs. third, developed v developing) dominated popular discourse, which is why it’s so deeply ingrained for so many of us. Which is a pity, because that world doesn’t exist any more. If you’re willing to re-examine some of your old-fashioned ideas, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that the story has changed.

Today, only 0.7 billion of the world’s 7.5 billion people live below the extreme poverty line. That’s less than 10 per cent of the world’s population. Not only is this the lowest proportion of people in extreme poverty ever, it’s also the lowest total number in more than 200 years. It’s the great economic success story of all time.

To paraphrase the indispensable Max Roser, the front-page headline every day should read:
‘Since yesterday, 250,000 people have been lifted out of bone-crushing, one-meal-a-day, soul-destroying, no-dentist, no-doctor, no-electricity, single accident-means-life-and-death, unrelenting, extreme poverty.’

It’s worth diving into this in a bit more detail. For most of recorded history, only a tiny elite enjoyed higher standards of living. By far the majority of people were dirt poor. That’s how things stayed. Inequality wasn’t a social issue, it was just the way the world worked. In the last 200 years this has changed dramatically.

Poverty has been falling continuously despite the world’s population increasing seven-fold during that time. And since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that process has accelerated, with an average of 47 million people lifted over the extreme poverty line every year for the last 25 years."
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#1586164
That is very good news. I don't care how rich somebody else is but I do care that some people are starving and unable to act to lift themselves out of poverty (I'm not convinced it's something that can be done by somebody else - although it can be prevented by somebody else). It won't happen tomorrow but steady progress in the right direction is a very good thing.
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#1586252
Slightly off topic... (What?...me? :oops: )

A large number of physically and mentally disadvantaged people used to be employed in Remploy factories. Shamefully, the bean-counters, rather than drag their dated product-lines into the 21 st. Century, made a compelling superficial and short-term case for closure.
The factories had a real social, community and wellness role.
Now, we pay more to keep them screwed-up and on "benefits" :?