this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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The top 10% of Americans own 70% of the country's wealth.
Have you ever stopped to consider the logical conclusions of that? If they lived at the same standard as the average American, we would only need to use 30% of the resources we're currently burning through. It's grossly inefficient. We waste more than 2/3rds of our resources so that rich assholes can live in $100 million mansions and fly around on private jets.
Say you're an American working a 9 to 5 job. Once you hit 1 pm on Tuesday, you've done enough work for the week to meet all the actual needs for society. The rest of Tuesday, all of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are all just to pay for rich assholes to take a "hunting" trip to Africa and needlessly slaughter native wildlife. Or to buy the 400th car in their special collections that they've nearly forgotten about. Etc. Etc.
70% of the irreplaceble oil being drilled? Flushed down the drain just so that rich assholes can horde wealth. 70% of the pollution in the air? Put there so that billionaires can have parties on a private island. So that they can fly their private jets to private retreats and pretend to be outdoorspeople for a weekend. 70% of the new extreme weather being caused by anthropogenic climate change? All so that rich assholes can do things like jet around the world so they can say they've played a round of golf on 7 different continents in 7 days. Etc. Etc.
It's nowhere near sustainable.
But someday maybe I might become a billionaire and it wouldn't be fair if we took away all the benefits before I make my first billion!
/s (obviously I'll never be a billionaire)
I'm no economist, but is that 70% of wealth money or net worth? If you own a company but live at an average standard, that company is still part of your net worth, even though it's not being wasted on luxury.
Jeff Bezos, for example, has a net worth of $158 billion. He owns about 10% of Amazon, which comes out to $133 billion. That means 84% of his wealth is just Amazon itself. The remaining $25 billion is still huge, of course. I'm not denying that. But if every other billionaire is in a similar layout (which I suspect they are,) then having them live at an average standard is not going to cut our work down to 30%.
Its important to remember that rich assholes buying expensive things is not a reason to hate them: that's envy. Rich assholes spending their money on expensive luxuries fund the luxury economy, which finds its way to the regular economy. That's how economies work, the money moves. The spending isn't the issue. It's the hoarding. You can't spend a trillion dollars. You can't spend a billion dollars. But you can keep it out of the economy. That's what keeps everyone else down.
It's like if the top 70% of the ocean was just fucking cement.
When their expensive luxuries are actively harming the planet, I think their indulgences offer us plenty of justification to hate. Private jets emit the same amount of CO2 in two hours that an average car does in a year. This frivolous waste poisons our air and warms our fragile seas. Iโm not envious of private jets or yachts; it would be unethical for me to use them no matter how much wealth I had.
The word you are looking for is investment, while what you've described here is consumption. Investment is far, far better than consumption. One is adding to the market, and the other is removing things from the market that could otherwise have been put to much better uses.