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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
