It's okay. The richest 85 people own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50% of the global population (1). I'm sure after we spend 8 hours of our day helping them towards owning even more of it, they'll do us a biggie by paying for our food and tiny apartments.
Again, this is a stupid statistic that inaccurately counts currently indebted but huge earning potential people (say, for example, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School) as "poorer" than a sub-Saharan subsistence farmer. Longer explanation here: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding...
The statistic might be stupid, but it does a marvellous job of illustrating immense inequality in wealth distribution, something which is both factual and important. Would you not agree?
If the statistic is inaccurate then it does a bad job at illustrating the inequality, because it's falsity discredits the conversation. In fact, it would be detrimental to the goal of telling the inequality story.
Generally the reason statistics are so dangerous when used to support an argument is that the argument quickly becomes about the validity of the number rather than the underlying issue.
At a very basic level comparing wealth between economies requires all sorts of subjective normalisation which is pretty open to challenge, and accounting for things like student debt is obviously going to be contentious.
Frankly I consider it surprising that you can even find the calculation methodology for something like that.
The trouble is that a burger flipper will not make as much money as an inventor, programmer, or doctor, no matter how much time you spend demanding minimum wage increases. The former's job is far less effort-intensive than the others; even if you created a fascist state and ordered that all burger-flippers be paid as CEOs, you would immediately lose your CEOs as they all quit to become burger-flippers.
Up-vote--I'm reminded of a line from Pear Buck's The Good Earth...
>"The common people had to move, then, and they moved complaining and cursing because a rich man could do as he would and they packed their tattered possessions and went away swelling with anger and muttering that one day they would come back even as the poor do come back when the rich are too rich."<
In 1911 the Xinhai Revolution in China, which the quote alludes to, demonstrates what is possible when income disparities reach a tipping point...
Leaves me wondering what's truly possible if the "global economy" ever truly begins a move in the direction of a global stasis...
Fun fact: Drones can be disabled by blinding them with excess visual or IR noise, jamming their control signals, or applying a fast-moving chunk of metal of appropriate size.
Further, drones are still limited to mostly open spaces. You can't clear a room with a quadcopter (yet), and a Predator missile strike is just as likely to kill loyal citizens as it is to kill the target.
Tanks are easily outmaneuvered by humans on foot. Planes cannot take a building and leave it intact. Drones have electronic weaknesses in addition to the usual flaws. And nukes are practically a joke--the fallout, physical and political, would ruin any nation.
TL;DR: Drones make terrible soldiers. Why do you think ISIS is still live and kicking?
But a stupid tactic is one that may result in defeat.
Sun Tzu's slightly-less-famous quote--"If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight"--has two meanings, like a lot of Asian philosophy does. The obvious part is, as the saying goes, sieze the day. The less obvious part is that you should only sieze the day if you know you can hang onto it.
In the case of nukes, only a damn fool would nuke his own food supply or factories, or perhaps a spiteful loser.
Honest question: isn't wealth distribution thought to be fractal? So economic inequality should grow as an economy expands, but that alone doesn't imply there must be less for an arbitrary participant.
I don't know much about economics, so sorry if I'm off base. It's just the statistic "XX people have more than YY% of people" gets thrown around in discussions, and I'm curious if it's cause for concern or just an economic fact.
The point of wealth inequality is, that it is rapidly increasing -- particularly in the last 20 years.
The parent poster implied, that by increasing the wealth of some, all will benefit. In my country, this was not the case in the last 20 years. The middle class that was rather broad and healthy, is loosing particularly in the less wealthy part -- many of those people fall down the ladder and are poor and will be even poorer when they are in old age.
My country once was one of the wealthiest of the world, because many people where wealthy and earned good money. It was unthinkable once, that big parts of the society might be poor or have to live from "soup kitchens" -- today it is reality and all projections show, that it will become even worse!
To be complete: My country is still one of the wealthiest of the world -- but with a much much smaller fraction of people owning the biggest part of this wealth.
1: http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2014/01/23/the-85-rich...