62 vs 3.5 billion

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  • December 11, 2017 at 8:07 pm #78773
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    “The world is run by an oligarchy of billionaires, as Bernie Sanders recently observed. To take power away from that oligarchy, it is necessary to take some of their wealth,……
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    ……..But the disease is pretty awful, and there are those who think that socialism, not mass death, might cure it. Scheidel notes that in the early 21st century, the 62 richest people on Earth own as much wealth as the poorer half of humanity, more than 3.5 billion people. And a lot of that poorer half is outright destitute. Scheidel speculates that the creation of predatory, wealth-stealing elites might be hard-wired into our species. So, like Thomas Piketty does in his writings on inequality in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Scheidel notes that the world wars countered inequality, but he takes the observation much further, into a pessimism that implicitly concludes that since only mass death can effectively create equality, we have to give up on equality. (Incidentally, Scheidel argues that many wars only serve to increase inequality. Not all death equalizes — only, he says, mass death in certain very specific circumstances.)

    However, as Trent University professor Bryan Palmer pointed out in a recent interview with Truthout, the idea that inequality has only ever effectively been lessened “by mass death is indeed pessimistic and highly worrying — not to mention contentious.”…see link
    link:http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42806-how-socialism-can-replace-mass-death-as-a-tool-for-leveling-inequality

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