I would not care at all if 1 ppm of the world population would hold 100 times the wealth of the poorest half of the world population, if all of the poorest half would have nonetheless the means to produce their minimum necessities in energy, food, clothes etc., independently of others, so that their survival for the next months or weeks or even days would not be completely dependent on the benevolence of the rich to create places where they must be employed in order to be able to survive.
A half of century ago, my grandparents were still relatively independent of the rest of the world, because they owned a house and some cultivated land, so even if their normal sources of revenue would have disappeared by becoming jobless, they could have still lived quite decently being sustained only by what they were producing in their garden and by their animals. They also did not depend on external services for things like water supply, garbage disposal or heating. They used electricity, but they had plenty of space so that today one could have used there enough solar panels to be also independent of external energy sources.
On the other hand, now I am living in a big city and I absolutely need a salary if I want to continue to live. Where I live there are no salaries for an engineer or programmer that are big enough so that one could ever buy a place like that owned by my grandparents.
I do not believe that this extreme dependency between employees and employers that has become more and more widespread during the last century will lead to anything good.
There are a lot of important technical problems that must be solved in order to ensure the survival of humanity, but the research to solve them is almost non-existent, because those who control the money are too short-sighted so they invest only according to various fads in research that will produce things of negligible benefit for most humans. The unsolved problems that have accumulated are such that only an effort of the kind that happened in the research done during World War II would solve them, but it seems unlikely that something like that will ever repeat.
I would agree here if our political systems weren't vulnerable to capture by wealth. Inequality drives more inequality, it has to be counterbalanced by laws.
The majority of human civilisation has been feudal. We recently got democracy for everyone. We are not yet out of reach of our local civilisational attractor.
But the reason that when talking about the 1% they suddenly stop looking globally and only look within countries is that everyone in the UK and US is top-1% worldwide. Equalizing would make the average wage $500, or 375 pounds. And when you start discussing what countries are the problem ... immediately you see there are very few poor democracies. There are some, but not much.
To make matters worse, this year's Nobel prize in Economics went to research showing that the problem is governments, and specifically that a lot of populous countries don't create institutions to improve the welfare of people at all, but rather focused on stealing from the population. This makes it an unfixable problem in those countries. More than that, a lot of these countries' populations don't want to fix it, or even want to make it far worse (like Egypt, or Iran, or Pakistan, or Sudan) for a whole host of reasons.
Oh and most of those governments are "captured by wealth" only in the sense that the current rulers exploit the population for their personal wealth. This is what you see from Afghanistan to Venezuela, but those governments didn't come to power with wealth. Various ideologies brought these governments to power, and the governments steal the wealth of the people, even to an extent that people start dying in pretty large numbers like in Afghanistan. I also find it strange that when discussing capture by wealth no-one ever takes Venezuela as an example, despite how obvious it is that that's the problem there. Nobody discusses how Chavez came to power as a "communist" and died a billionaire.
So if you want to fix poverty, one of the things it looks like you'll have to do is to overthrow the governments ruling, actually more than half of humanity, and convince their populations to stop caring more about religion and other ideologies, like pride, or a mostly imagined enemy (like Pakistan), than about prosperity.
You can still recreate that life right now if you want, but people are choosing not to (I also choose not to so I'm not saying it's some requirement to do so).
You can get a piece of land and have a simple house on it, get a wood stove, stop buying things that generate trash (grow your own food, etc. and compost all scraps). Raise animals like chickens and goats. Put in a well. There's a ton of guides and YouTube videos out there about people who homestead.
I know people who do this on 1-2 acres and are a couple hours from a major city. The reality is that it's a ton of work and there's downsides, it depends on what kind of person you are.
(This is responding to your specific comment, I know that choosing to do this in the developed world is different from people who have no choice and no options in a developing country/place).
I don't think it's self-sufficiency that should be the goal for society here, but self-sufficiency is one of several means to achieve the goal.
I think the goal should be for everybody to have the ability to walk away from an abusive boss, landlord or spouse without jeopardizing their life essentials. Which is a stronger statement than just saying that everybody should be able to afford their life essentials.
Not having a boss or landlord is a great way of achieving this, but it's not the only way. (If you don't have a boss, you do need the freedom to turn away abusive clients or customers)
Another way is ensuring that the essentials are universally available. Universal health care, public housing and a SNAP program that's not itself abusive is another.
Another HN-popular mechanism is UBI.
Another mechanism that helps greatly is ensuring that the essentials are inexpensive. Clothing and food have become cheap, but healthcare and housing have more than absorbed the difference.
I mean, not to discount the hard work that your grandparents would have to maintain a self-sustaining life but... it could only work out because they had land available for that. You live in a city and depend on salary because you don't own a parcel of fertile land from which you could be generating enough sustenance for yourself (estimates go from 1/10th to a full acre per person).
Many grandparents are too frail to dig enough spuds or work the garden - anecdotally 70s is when limitations often start to really kick in. Grandparents are now trending older?
This, "If you have enough, why does it matter if someone else has more" argument doesn't really hold. Yes we can make more TVs and phones so that everyone can get one, but then get to things like centrally located housing, where there is a limited supply. It matters a lot if you want someplace to live, and there are thousands of very rich people trying to out bid one and other for the same space in your city. This is why housing is no longer affordable.
not that I disagree with you in principle but it is a bad example. there are a lot more places where rich do not want to live than places where they do so rich outbidding you for housing wouldn't make even a top-100 list of issues. the "If you have enough, why does it matter if someone else has more" is basically "rich get to live in Monaco, you get to live in Elmo, Kansas" with all your needs met
A good location means more opportunities. Someone located in the center of a large expensive city will have a lot more opportunities to make money and meet people who have influence than someone in Elmo. A business set up in Elmo will not make as much money as a business set up in Monaco. This means that the best opportunities are reserved for people who need them the least.
San Francisco was the cheap to live city that allowed poor, non-monetary obsessed youth to move there and live a hippie lifestyle.
Silicon valley was backward cheap farmland that allowed students in the nearby universities to stay in an area with their college friends and start their business ideas instead of moving back home.
Anywhere there is excess energy/synergy the rich move in and try to capture it, sucking it out. You need places where society can grow, where excess energy is allowed to create excitement/progress/try new things.
Well, money is power, so wealth inequality is power inequality. Those 100x wealthy people will have 100x (or more) the power, and people with power like that like to do bad things to those that don't have it.
See, it isn't about having stuff, it is about having power over people. That's why inequality is horrible.
Wealth translates easily into political power and influence. Do we care if Saudi Royalty and billionaires have power to shape societies, use power over us, determine what media we consume etc. Most of the history the rich and powerful ruled over us, why we can't go on living like that.
Kushner, Saudi, Ellisons behind Paramount, Warner, X, ... is nothing to fear of.
“There’s so much I’m learning from being here, In the States it feels really grim; and even in the less than 24 hours that I’ve been here in Saudi Arabia, I have a renewed faith in the cinema.” -- Dakota Johnson (Actress)
A half of century ago, my grandparents were still relatively independent of the rest of the world, because they owned a house and some cultivated land, so even if their normal sources of revenue would have disappeared by becoming jobless, they could have still lived quite decently being sustained only by what they were producing in their garden and by their animals. They also did not depend on external services for things like water supply, garbage disposal or heating. They used electricity, but they had plenty of space so that today one could have used there enough solar panels to be also independent of external energy sources.
On the other hand, now I am living in a big city and I absolutely need a salary if I want to continue to live. Where I live there are no salaries for an engineer or programmer that are big enough so that one could ever buy a place like that owned by my grandparents.
I do not believe that this extreme dependency between employees and employers that has become more and more widespread during the last century will lead to anything good.
There are a lot of important technical problems that must be solved in order to ensure the survival of humanity, but the research to solve them is almost non-existent, because those who control the money are too short-sighted so they invest only according to various fads in research that will produce things of negligible benefit for most humans. The unsolved problems that have accumulated are such that only an effort of the kind that happened in the research done during World War II would solve them, but it seems unlikely that something like that will ever repeat.