> All the money of the richest people in the U.S. could provide the poorest with a good income for a year or two, but then it's gone
That's actually not true.
Think about where all that money goes when people spend it.
And then the people who receive it spend it again. Etc.
Round in a circle, basically, so they will continue to have a good income for much longer than the back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests.
Perhaps in perpetuity if the redistribution continues; then it would be a system change rather than a one-off event.
That said, I completely agree with you about investment, especially in things like housing, and other forms of investment and wealth generation.
> I believe economic growth is how you erase poverty
If you believe in the idea that "what you measure is what you create", then it depends on how economic growth is measured.
Measures that look at growing the average wealth or economic activity of people in a population largely ignore poverty. Even with a lot of desparately poor people, because of the power law distribution of wealth, the poorest people contribute less to the average than their numbers would suggest.
For that sort of reason, I prefer the idea that a society is judged by how it treats its poorest people first.
(And by people I don't mean citizens, because non-citizen residents are real people too.)
Thank you for you comment! I think that’s a very good point about the money circulating, but at that point it feels like an end that could be achieved by printing money, but the problem isn’t really a lack of money, it’s a lack of things like housing and whatnot. I think perhaps printing money could help, but lots of places have tried to print their way to prosperity and it tends to end badly, so I don’t know...
That said, I do agree with what you said about measuring growth and poverty, but I think the simple math about redistribution is useful because while you can circulate dollars, you can’t circulate factories or farms or infrastructure. Wealth in useful forms throws off income that is a small percentage of what those things are worth, if you “consume” the wealth and not just the income, then the wealth is destroyed and doesn’t produce more wealth, and the numbers on redistributing income look even more bleak than the numbers on redistributing total wealth in dollar terms. And that’s what I feebly attempted to communicate, that there just aren’t enough productive assets in the world to produce all the things we as a species need to feel like we’re living our best lives and certainly not to do so sustainably.
That's actually not true.
Think about where all that money goes when people spend it.
And then the people who receive it spend it again. Etc.
Round in a circle, basically, so they will continue to have a good income for much longer than the back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests.
Perhaps in perpetuity if the redistribution continues; then it would be a system change rather than a one-off event.
That said, I completely agree with you about investment, especially in things like housing, and other forms of investment and wealth generation.
> I believe economic growth is how you erase poverty
If you believe in the idea that "what you measure is what you create", then it depends on how economic growth is measured.
Measures that look at growing the average wealth or economic activity of people in a population largely ignore poverty. Even with a lot of desparately poor people, because of the power law distribution of wealth, the poorest people contribute less to the average than their numbers would suggest.
For that sort of reason, I prefer the idea that a society is judged by how it treats its poorest people first.
(And by people I don't mean citizens, because non-citizen residents are real people too.)