Tag: Inequality

Charlie Munger and Major Barbara – Life Imitates Art

‘I’d rather be a billionaire and not be loved by everybody’: Charlie Munger shrugs off controversy over $200M donation for nearly windowless dorm

News of McFadden’s resignation sparked the latest round of criticism of elite philanthropists and their sway over public projects. “It’s one thing to put your name on a building, [and] it’s another level of egomania to condition a gift on accepting the donor’s architectural plan entirely without modification,” wrote Stanford political scientist Rob Reich, author of “Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better,” on Twitter.

Munger shrugged off charges that billionaires are too influential. “You’ve got to get used to the fact that billionaires aren’t the most popular people in our society,” he told MarketWatch. “I’d rather be a billionaire and not be loved by everybody than not have any money.”

Marketwatch
Leslie Albrecht

SHIRLEY [angrily] Who made your millions for you? Me and my like. What’s kep us poor? Keepin you rich. I wouldn’t have your conscience, not for all your income.

UNDERSHAFT. I wouldn’t have your income, not for all your conscience, Mr Shirley.

Major Barbara
George Bernard Shaw

Major Barbara is a three-act English play by George Bernard Shaw, written and premiered in 1905 and first published in 1907. The story concerns an idealistic young woman, Barbara Undershaft, who is engaged in helping the poor as a Major in the Salvation Army in London. For many years, Barbara and her siblings have been estranged from their father, Andrew Undershaft, who now reappears as a rich and successful munitions maker. Undershaft, the father, gives money to the Salvation Army, offending Major Barbara, who does not want to be connected to his “tainted” wealth. However, the father argues that poverty is a worse problem than munitions, and claims that he is doing more to help society by giving his workers jobs and a steady income than Major Barbara is doing to help them by giving them bread and soup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Barbara

The 1%

The Cost of Inequality: $42,000 per Median US Worker – Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/the-cost-of-inequality-42000-per-median-us-worker/

… the question that Eric Levitz poses in New York Magazine is provocative. And the data, certainly, illustrate the severity of the income shift that has taken place over the past 45 years.

Specifically, Levitz examines a study by Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards from the Rand Corporation. And, yes, that is the same Rand Corporation of Pentagon Papers fame, so it’s fair to call it an establishment-based source. Anyhow, Price and Edwards in their study, which was conducted in partnership with the Fair Work Center, ask the following question: If the share of worker income to total income were the same in 2018 as in 1975, and growth was the same, how much would the median worker earn in 2018?

The answer: $92,000. That’s a full $42,000 greater than the actual 2018 median worker income, which was $50,000.

Steve Dubb
The Cost of Inequality: $42,000 per Median US Worker
NONPROFIT QUARTERLY

What’s classy if you’re rich but trashy if you’re poor? AskReddit


What’s classy if you’re rich but trashy if you’re poor? from AskReddit

chowderneck
The most expensive thing you own is a really old car.

splonkFlooper
Having a lawyer’s business card in your wallet.

Spoonhorse
Being called Duke. Or Earl.

Itskevin91
Living at a hotel

audguy
Getting money from the government.

waleed2198
Showing up to a formal occasion in t-shirt and jeans.

Cocobean4
Substance abuse. Rich people are ‘troubled’ whereas poor people are just junkies.

CadetCovfefe
Also mental disorders. Howard Hughes locks himself in his room, doesn’t shower and starts pissing in bottles and he’s an eccentric genius that gets a movie made about him by Martin Scorsese. Dude down the block does it and he’s just a nut.

reddit

My take – Moving around. If you’re rich it means you travel and are jet set. If you’re poor it means your transient and rootless.

Inequality – Some Suggestions on How to Address – New York Times

NYTIMES

Two Janitors – Their Prospects and Compensation, 35 Years Ago Vs. Now

The $16.60 per hour Ms. Ramos earns as a janitor at Apple works out to about the same in inflation-adjusted terms as what Ms. Evans earned 35 years ago. But that’s where the similarities end.

Ms. Evans was a full-time employee of Kodak. She received more than four weeks of paid vacation per year, reimbursement of some tuition costs to go to college part time, and a bonus payment every March. When the facility she cleaned was shut down, the company found another job for her: cutting film.

Ms. Ramos is an employee of a contractor that Apple uses to keep its facilities clean. She hasn’t taken a vacation in years, because she can’t afford the lost wages. Going back to school is similarly out of reach. There are certainly no bonuses, nor even a remote possibility of being transferred to some other role at Apple.

Yet the biggest difference between their two experiences is in the opportunities they created. A manager learned that Ms. Evans was taking computer classes while she was working as a janitor and asked her to teach some other employees how to use spreadsheet software to track inventory. When she eventually finished her college degree in 1987, she was promoted to a professional-track job in information technology.

To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now
Neil Irwin
NYTIMES

Wes Moore Interview, Fresh Air

Moore says the deaths of Freddie Gray and George Floyd highlight injustices that go beyond police brutality.

“The justice that’s also being sought must be an economic justice. It must be health justice. It must be housing justice,” Moore says. “If we permit these tragedies to recede from our memory, we will risk the opportunity to change the systems that are ultimately responsible for all of these injustices.”

Fresh Air

Inequality, some numbers – The New York Times

Overall, the richest 0.1 percent of American households own 19.6 percent of the nation’s total wealth, up from 15.9 percent in 2005 and 7.4 percent in 1980. The richest 0.1 percent now have the same combined net worth as the bottom 85 percent.

The wealth trends have been especially hard on younger Americans. The median net worth of Americans under age 35 — who started off substantially poorer on average than older Americans — is 40 percent lower than the net worth of Americans under 35 was in 2004. The net worth of Americans over age 65, by contrast, has risen 9 percent over the same period. The Boomers, in short, are richer than their predecessors, and Millennials and Generation X are poorer than their predecessors.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/opinion/coronavirus-us-economy-inequality.html