cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/57305272
Total billionaire wealth in the EU reached €2.4 trillion by late November, exceeding Italy’s entire GDP of €2.2 trillion and approaching France’s €2.9 trillion economy, a new Oxfam report found.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20260118190308/https://euobserver.com/health-and-society/ara3abf5ee
I believe Plato pointed this out in The Republic.
He thought the richest citizen needed to have no more then 5x the wealth of the poorest citizen or you would inevitably slide into oligarchy.
We crossed that threshold so long ago that you can make 5x the poverty level and still not be able to afford a house.
How strange that some Texas university was recently banning a professor from teaching Plato to students because it had too much “equality” in it.
No shit!
Most of the words ultra-wealthy are verifiably sociopathic. Capitalism literally rewards those who posses the least empathy, the most.
It’s more than that. It’s a feedback loop. Having distance from the consequences of your actions encourages sociopathic behavior. Power such as wealth is the easiest way to create that distance, even if you don’t want to
The sky also happens to be blue. That gotta be news too.
Edit: Okay, having read the summary, it seems like they have proved causality between growing economic inequality and democratic backsliding. Which yeah, most people could have guessed, but now we have a fancy bunch of paper that says so.
Recent high-profile acquisitions include Jeff Bezos purchasing the Washington Post, Elon Musk buying Twitter (now X), and Patrick Soon-Shiong acquiring the Los Angeles Times. A billionaire consortium also bought significant stakes in The Economist.
In France, far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré has transformed CNews into what critics call the French equivalent of Fox News. In the United Kingdom, three-quarters of newspaper circulation is controlled by just four wealthy families.
This is amazing. News and communication in the internet age was supposed to be democratised publication and agency to the voice of the average person, and it is to a small extent, but for the most part society was just like
Not just rich people, also stupidity is a threat to democracy but how to fix it?
One reason that people are stupid is because rich people need slave labor, so they set up a system where people don’t learn to think for themselves.
The stupidity is happening because it benefits rich people to fill the world with stupid people. Stupid, gullible people are the key to their endlessly growing profits and wealth extraction.
We already know how to solve stupidity. We have always known it. Education has been one of the core pillars of human civilization since antiquity. It wasn’t the first man to discover fire who changed everything, it was the person who discovered how to teach the next generation to control fire at least as well if not better than they originally did.
Education has not failed us. Education has been sabotaged and dismantled. By rich and powerful people, for their own purposes.
First we get rid of those rich and powerful people who have set themselves against us, then we rebuild everyone’s education and if we’re lucky, we might get to move on with our civilization eventually. Nobody promised it’s going to be easy. But it is necessary, if we wish the human race to continue, and traditionally we’ve been pretty stubbornly invested in that.
but how to fix it?
Better education.
Rich people are a very solvable problem, so let’s focus on problems we can solve first okay
ALL the rich people, right? Including pootin and Pooh bear?
What makes you think that Pooh is rich?
Racists like to compare President Xi to a yellow animal.
I was just playing along with their use of language. Irregardless, it doesn’t strike me as Xi would be among billionaires.
Actually Xi is probably the richest person on earth.
Why? Because China is the world’s 2.5th biggest economy (2nd only to the US when counting countries, but the EU is richer than China and is often counted), and it’s the biggest dictatorship (for now, since the US is at risk of dictatorship). Being a dictator, he COULD just sell parts of the country and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be stopped if he tried. And when something can be sold and thus converted to money, it counts as wealth.
It’s a good thing then that he uses his power to redistribute wealth, alleviating poverty and building infrastructure.
He doesn’t need private wealth when he controls an entire nation for life.
