There's something that is not quite right about that shutterstock photo. Something is not quite ready.

do you see why we love Charles NOW?

I see it!

I admit, I saw the info-graphic and I had the typical 'that's as lot of money!' response without considering what the true value of that money really is. Very thought provoking post.

Great post!

Good post, Charles. I recommend you and others reading this to check out the book "Debt, the first 5,000 years". It covers the same terrain of money, wealth, & value over as long a timeline as imaginable.

http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The-First-000…

While the oxfam number may be misleading, there is so much totally wrong about this article its clear that the author just wants to ejaculate buzzwords and doesn't understand shit about the world financial system. For example, you can't compare personal wealth with world GDP, the numbers have such different definitions, any comparison is misleading and worthless - one is the value of assets the other is world compensation of employees + gross operating surplus + gross mixed income + taxes less subsidies on production and imports (from wikipedia).

Lots of excuses by a rich person (in a global sense) for the 10-20 richest people that are his neighbors in the same US county.

@ 6) http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-b…

More Mudeddled thinking. Any you know what these wealthy people do with their wealth? They put it into banks who don't do anything with it, and under mattresses where it remains untouched.

Or do they?

No, they put it into banks, where it is distributed as loans, to help people buy houses, cars, vacations, equipment, etc. all of which creates JOBS. Or they invest it in businesses, that employ people with ideas and ambition.

Why do you look at prosperity as a zero sum game? Money is just an exchange of value. The rich don't just eat the cash and it goes away.

Only Mudede works for multimillionaire advertisers, in a building owned my a multi-millionaire, typing into a device made by a billionaire, using technology commercialized by another billionaire, and then wonders who sent all their money to the rich guys? YOU made the rich Mudede. You and all your other hapless, low-ambition, skill-light liberal arts majors helped make them rich. And now you want the government to get your money back?

Good luck in life!

Wow, that's quite a forced use of moral relativism to justify using two definitions of the same word ("wealth") to create a distinction without a difference.

Come on here. If you're going to compare the wealth of two groups, you have to use the same definition of wealth for them both to make the comparison.

"The wealth at the top is not the same as the wealth at the bottom." The moment you embrace this subjective drivel, your conclusion is so biased it is meaningless. Wealth is wealth. Sure, the word has more than one definition. But you've got to pick one and stick with it when making a single sentence comparison. The logical fallacies that your argument is predicated upon are literally elementary in their simplicity.

@10 LOL.

@11, Food is food. But where it comes from makes a great deal of difference. A plate of broccoli from your garden is not equal to a fast-food hamburger. They are different on every level, nutrition, energy required to produce them, labor to get them to your table, preparation, planning, etc. None of it is 'subjective drivel'.

Understanding where things come from is a good exercise in understanding our world. Deriding that is pure ignorance.

@13, you prove my point for me. Your first sentence sums up my position. Nuance in and of itself is not subjective drivel, I agree. Differences, distinctions, and meaning are real things (for all they are rarely concrete). An origin of an item can have huge relevance.

But for the most part that is all tangential. When you are judging the nutritional quality of two foods, you do not ascribe properties to the base fiber (as in nutrient, not composition) of one that you do not to the other. The magnesium in one is valued against the magnesium in the other.

What Charles does here (intentionally and quite disingenuously) is call the magnesium of one vegetable (or the wealth of one income class) to be different in composition to the magnesium found in another vegetable (the wealth of a different income class).

Those legitimate nuances you want to point out, that I feel are important (and I ken you do too) are obfuscated by Charles' maneuver here. This disingenuousness hampers the truth. You can't have an honest discussion about income inequality with your numbers fixed like this. There is no honest, objective account to analyze at that point.

I think Charles is trying to point out that differing income levels perceive and treat wealth differently. This is a no brainer. But to use logical fallacies to blatant and facile they would make a birther take a step back with apprehension does a disservice to the topic. This is sadly quite common with Mr. Mudede's attempts at journalism. When he is right, his position is so forced, isolated, and alien from logic or common world view that he damages what he tries to support. He is his own worst enemy, and as someone who considers themselves to the left of Marx and Mudede, I feel he has placed himself in a position to be the enemy of what I call progress as well.

You would think that a person who has spent so much time reading about Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps would know what a simpler financial asset is comprised of. Or what the words "balance sheet" and "asset" and "liability" mean.

It's not vapours and fairydust. It's debt. Obligations to pay, agreed to willingly, signed and dated.

There is a lot of complex gambling done on top of simple financial assets, of course, but if you really believe the basis for it all is imaginary, could you please spot me $300 until I get my next paycheck?

This article reads an awful lot like what the first climate change deniers articles must have sounded like.

The derivatives market is essentially a zero sum game of offsetting transactions. All derivatives in existence may have a face value of $500 trillion, but like a we'll run sports book, all the trades essentially offset each other. Comparing that to GDP is simply odd, since they measure two completely different things.

@12, Exactly! I couldn't quite tell if Zok was being sarcastic or not. It's a good thing we have these smart rich people who take all the money and put it into banks so I can borrow some of it to buy a house or so that someone else can give me a job! How ever would we survive without our rich financial overlords that make everything possible for the rest of us?

@10 Do you realize absolutely none of what you said is true? Charles certainly didn't "make the rich." The system that did has been in place much longer. Sure we are typing on devices made by rich people. Do we have any other choice? There aren't any small companies to buy said devices from. They are all immediately engulfed by the big ones.

@15 I'll spot you that $300 with interest, then turn around and sell the IOU to someone else for more than that predicated on the idea that whoever buys it will get more than the asking price because of accumulated interest, etc. etc.

When you fail to pay any of the money back, shit will hit the fan because most of the money exchanged was imaginary, but I won't care because I cashed out.

It's not about quibbling over meaningless differences, it's that all this imaginary money buys elections and tanks economies. Power goes to gamblers, and people who produce things get more debt.

Financial Wealth is generally considered to be wealth in the form of Stocks, Bonds, Trusts, Bank Accounts, Business Equity, Non-home Real Estate, Cash and so on.

Who Rules America: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/pow…