Hi I made the original comment. After I posted I saw that the thread was a repost and that all the comments were on the original thread. Seeing as the original was already quite old and thinking the repost would not take off I just deleted my comment and moved on. So I was very surprised to see this replied to later. I would undelete it if I could.
Well I can reply back anyway. You gave a very detailed description on how wealth inequality appears and you explained a lot of basic economic theory. It’s a great comment but I don’t think we actually disagree. My point is not that wealth inequality is a non-issue. Of course it’s a huge issue. But these headlines which say that the top x% has as much wealth as the bottom x% are close to meaningless for two reasons. One is that a huge amount of people have 0 wealth without necessarily being poor or having a low standard of living. This can be because of having student loans or from voluntarily not saving. It can also be people who are too young to have meaningfully saved anything. How many of these people with zero or close to zero wealth are actually poor? I don’t know so these metrics don’t say anything to me. Say 20% of the world population has 0 or negative wealth. Then I can say that the homeless man with 1 dollar in his pocket has more wealth than the bottom 20% of the world population. Would be a true statement but ultimately meaningless.
As income inequality is the true source of wealth inequality I prefer discussions about that. But if wealth inequality specifically is to be discussed, which it has all right to be, then a metric like the “top x% wealthiest own x% of the world wealth” is much preferable. A metric like that is actually understandable immediately and says much more about how unequal the wealth distribution is. The metric in this headline I see as sensationalism.
Oh and by the way land can absolutely be both rented out and sold. In many countries renting land is the main way to expand your farm as owners seldom want to sell their land. I work in agriculture so I often give agricultural analogies. Sorry if it wasn’t easy to understand. Though I admit I don’t know the specifics in Laos.
Thanks for replying! I see what you mean. I’ve thought very lightly about the metric you proposed and I do think it would work.
I’m from SEA and have family who work in agriculture, and I hadn’t heard of renting out arable land being a popular practice. But I have no idea about common practices in other countries.
Hi I made the original comment. After I posted I saw that the thread was a repost and that all the comments were on the original thread. Seeing as the original was already quite old and thinking the repost would not take off I just deleted my comment and moved on. So I was very surprised to see this replied to later. I would undelete it if I could.
Well I can reply back anyway. You gave a very detailed description on how wealth inequality appears and you explained a lot of basic economic theory. It’s a great comment but I don’t think we actually disagree. My point is not that wealth inequality is a non-issue. Of course it’s a huge issue. But these headlines which say that the top x% has as much wealth as the bottom x% are close to meaningless for two reasons. One is that a huge amount of people have 0 wealth without necessarily being poor or having a low standard of living. This can be because of having student loans or from voluntarily not saving. It can also be people who are too young to have meaningfully saved anything. How many of these people with zero or close to zero wealth are actually poor? I don’t know so these metrics don’t say anything to me. Say 20% of the world population has 0 or negative wealth. Then I can say that the homeless man with 1 dollar in his pocket has more wealth than the bottom 20% of the world population. Would be a true statement but ultimately meaningless.
As income inequality is the true source of wealth inequality I prefer discussions about that. But if wealth inequality specifically is to be discussed, which it has all right to be, then a metric like the “top x% wealthiest own x% of the world wealth” is much preferable. A metric like that is actually understandable immediately and says much more about how unequal the wealth distribution is. The metric in this headline I see as sensationalism.
Oh and by the way land can absolutely be both rented out and sold. In many countries renting land is the main way to expand your farm as owners seldom want to sell their land. I work in agriculture so I often give agricultural analogies. Sorry if it wasn’t easy to understand. Though I admit I don’t know the specifics in Laos.
Thanks for replying! I see what you mean. I’ve thought very lightly about the metric you proposed and I do think it would work.
I’m from SEA and have family who work in agriculture, and I hadn’t heard of renting out arable land being a popular practice. But I have no idea about common practices in other countries.