Everyone. That includes the small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth. Everyone needs to contribute to the wellbeing of society as a whole and nobody is exempt.
I'd like to emphasize that the above should be immediately obvious. The fact that it's not does not bode well for humanity's future.
Billionaires simply _should not exist_. The fact that the power to shape societies is concentrated in so few can account for many of the existential threats we face today. AI is not "the problem", it's merely the latest symptom of our broken system and the prioritization of the wrong goals and outcomes.
AI, automation, and globalization would all be uncontroversially brilliant if the benefits weren't distributed like "150% of net benefit to capital, -50% net benefit to labor, better hope some of it trickles down brokie!"
Billionaires who inherit their wealth shouldn’t exist. But I have no problem with people like Bezos owning a sizable percentage share of valuable companies they created. When I was a kid, getting something ordered by mail took a week or two, even if you called in the order. UPS and FedEx existed, warehouses and storage trucks existed, but Bezos reduced that to a matter of hours. And now the sheeple can get their daily Amazon deliveries while complaining that Bezos is making a nickel on each one.
In a purely analytical calculation—without emotional nonsense—one Jeff Bezos obviously is vastly more beneficial to society than thousands of ordinary people. If we just had school teachers, or whoever else you idealize, we’d all be living in mud huts. The average person would be living like an animal without the technology created by exceptional people like Bezos. Why shouldn’t society reward them lavishly?
Bezos didn't create that wealth alone. He had help from thousands upon thousands of people. It's impossible to calculate how much of the value of Amazon was actually created by the work Bezos did, how much by other people in the company, and how much was just natural evolution brought about by technological and societal change. Bezos gets billions because he is in a position of power where he gets to take it, not because he created that much value.
But even if Bezos actually creates billions of value on his own, it doesn't mean that he should get those billions. The reward for such high value work should be high enough that Bezos chooses to do it instead of something else, but it doesn't need to be higher than that. In a world where the highest paid position would reward a few million instead of a few billion, I'm sure Bezos and people like him would still gravitate towards that work since it'd still be work with the best rewards.
People who have some revolutionary ideas wouldn't abandon them if the potential highest reward was millions instead of billions. Or do you believe that there are people with good ideas right now that abandon them because they can't earn trillions with the idea? What people expect as a reward for their work is what decides whether they do it or not. If we can lower the expectation, we can get the high value work without creating dangerous levels of power concentration.
My parent comment points out why society should not "reward them lavishly" as you say. However, I would (and did) put it in different terms. I'll elaborate as I think you misunderstand me.
I have no issue with incentivising and rewarding individuals who contribute great works. Any rewards, monetary or otherwise, would be fine if our institutions could continue to serve all and not just the few "rewarded" individuals.
Unfortunately, time has proven that money and power are intrinsically linked and those same few will continue to shape how and what paths humanity takes at large. I'm simply stating we should tread more carefully and not place all trust in a few cult of personalities as many seem to, and your response implies. Perhaps the stories of the self-made individual and the chances of becoming one of those few (however vanishing small the chance) is too ingrained in our collective psyche that we blind ourselves to what parts we actually play in this game.
The trade offs here aren't as simple as getting packages sooner rather than later. The tradeoffs are accepting a brutal, fuedalistic society where the negative outcomes for the many are disregarded for the positive outcomes of the few.
Perhaps the negative outcomes are too "invisible" in our daily lives because we, in tech, are isolated enough by nature of being fairly well compensated for the work we do. This in all likelihood will change if history is our guide. I personally know many individuals that work 2 or 3 jobs to be able to afford a roof over their heads because of wage suppression by corporations like the one you mention. Teachers, healthcare workers and the like. You may not see them as important but you may want to reflect on why. Meanwhile, the commons are actively being destroyed: hard won clean air and water protections are being rolled back. My father is dying of cancer because of exposure to chemicals that corporations actively lobbied to hide from the public at all costs, even though they were well aware of the dangers. These are the real results of direct corporate lobbying efforts made by the rewarded few. I don't see this as an "emotional" argument to make, but rather an inherently humanist one.
My children are growing up in a world with dimmer prospects than I or my parents had. If this is simply the cost of faster packages, than I want none of it.
If American billionaires couldn't exist then America would be even poorer and underdeveloped than Europe, the entire tech industry wouldn't exist, and it'd be entirely at the mercy of China. Because nobody's going to start a business in a country that violently confiscates their wealth just for being successful. The envy of people like yourself is a deep moral illness that destroys civilizations if left unchecked.
Have you actually spent an appreciable amount of time outside of the US? Europe isn't the place of destitution and squalor you imply. I highly suggest it, to widen your perspective at least. Maybe then you'll see it's quite the reverse in many cases.
Good luck taking away the detached single family homes, pickup trucks, SUVs, commercial flights, out of season fruits/vegetables, and imported manufactured goods. The people that expect those things are the “
small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth”, and there are quite a few of them (probably 1B+ worldwide).
Except for commercial flights (which I would easily give up for a hopeful society), I do not find anything on your list remotely relevant to my happiness or well-being.
Imported cheap goods are obviously something all of us consume a lot, but we only need them to feel good in comparison to our neighbours.
As long as we keep them for hospitals and medicine, the rest going away would be just fine. Children would play with whatever they can find instead of cheap plastic toys, we would have to learn to multi-purpose our tools instead of having a specific object for every minor purpose.
There is a wild difference between asking people not to eat apples in December in the northern hemisphere and asking people not to move wealth around to avoid paying taxes when they have more resources available to them than multiple countries.
Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.
> Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.
Those two groups are on the greater side of the inequality, and the third group is on the lesser side of the inequality. All the dragons on their mountains of gold can stop existing, and the inequality barely changes.
Yes, but in the opposite way to what you think. Do the math, there's billions of people consuming the overly cheap, massively subsidized goods and services parent listed; there's only so many billionaires and they have only so many billions, and most of it is just fake bullshit accounting paper-shuffling anyway.
I have no idea what you are trying to say. Forbes Real-Time Billionaires covers the full ~3,000-person list. The 2025 annual snapshot: 3,028 billionaires with combined net worth of $16.1 trillion
My comment did not compare those enjoying detached single family homes and large vehicles and flying to vacations with the richest few thousand people in the US and Europe.
Avicebron brought up inequality as the root cause.
DavidPiper indicated only the few thousand richest as the root cause.
Rayiner questioned if those few thousand richest have the means or capacity to reduce inequality.
estimator7292 responded that everyone has to help reduce inequality.
To which I wanted to point out exactly what would need to be sacrificed, because it would involve sacrifices among the top 10% to 20% of the world (constituting many on this forum) which those 10% to 20% would not even consider a "luxury". It is easy to claim a billionaire's private jet is an expendable luxury exacerbating inequality, but the reality is the bar is far lower than that (see statistics on energy used per capita, which can serve as a good proxy for which side of the inequality the lifestyle you might expect is).
That is why we are all mostly talk and no walk, because push comes to shove, we can't even get a sufficient fossil fuel tax passed to slow climate change for our own descendants, much less voluntarily decrease our standard of living solely for the benefit of others in the world.
Most of the younger people don't care about most of those things. That preference just isn't reflected in markets because older generations control a disproportionate (unfair) portion of wealth.
