Holy shit dude, being in a minority group does not.make you an extremist. Would you call people with Field’s disease extremists too? No, of course not. But you would call them extremists if they believed that everyone who doesn’t have Field’s disease should be enslaved or to donate all the Earth’s resources for their well-being. Likewise with billionaires.
Comment on Billionaires are extremists
vk6flab@lemmy.radio 4 days ago
That’s an interesting observation.
Given the 3,028 billionaires among the 8 billion people on Earth, that’s the definition of extreme.
Those 3,028 people, or 0.000036% of the global population, hold more than 99% of all wealth.
grindemup@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Mr_Fish@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Using Field’s disease there is a huge false equivalence, for two main reasons.
A: you can’t just choose not to have Field’s, but a billionaire is capable of donating their wealth to charity or something, and no longer being a billionaire.
B: the existence of people with Field’s has little to no impact on the average person outside that group, but the existence of billionaires massively changes
vk6flab@lemmy.radio 4 days ago
You don’t think that 3,028 people holding 99% of global wealth is extreme?
grindemup@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I do, my comment was in response to the first sentence of the comment. It sounded like he was saying a minority group is the definition of extreme, but perhaps I misinterpreted it, as indeed the word billionaire was included and I could have been more charitable in my interpretation.
warbond@lemmy.world 4 days ago
This is why online discourse is so hard! Beyond the anonymity, which causes its own problems, the absence of nonverbal cues and lack of immediacy in feedback leaves a lot open to interpretation, so anything can be taken in any way.
Opinions become accusations and idle musings become absolute certainty in the vacuum of supporting information that is text-only communication. I worry that the only real solution is for people to–like you–embrace the uncertainty and gracefully admit that their interpretation could be wrong. And it seems likely that the only way to collectively get to that point is to fuck it up a lot for a long time.
sus@programming.dev 4 days ago
The actual number is closer to 9% than 99%. This is probably a broken telephone from “the combined wealth of billionaires is larger than the GDP of 99% of countries” where notably yearly income and wealth are not directly comparable.
Better (and true) things to say are “The global top 1% have more wealth than the bottom 95% combined” or “The richest 0.01% in the US have tripled their wealth in the last 30 years, while 90% of people have been treading water”
vk6flab@lemmy.radio 4 days ago
www.thecanary.co/…/billionaires-wealth-2025/