damnedfurry

for every new layer of problem you uncover you can ask "so what are the causes for that" until you reach something that can be fixed wit money.

This is just a naive assumption.

The statement that a single billionaire's wealth can not only solve world hunger, but do it so easily as to compare it to a snap of the fingers, is frankly, comically absurd, and exposes not only a massive ignorance of the root causes of the starvation that is still occurring in the modern day, but even for those issues which CAN be solved with an injection of funds, a massive ignorance of just how MUCH funding it would take.

As one tiny example, the US, a single country, spends over 1 TRILLION on welfare, not once or in total, but annually. And a mere FOUR percent of Earth's population lives there.

Even the wealthiest human being on the planet's net worth is nothing compared to what it would take to solve even the small minority of issues cold hard cash can solve. You have no sense of perspective and scale on this.

Businesses that were too successful are also called monopolies

No. There is no inherent relationship between the two things. A business can absolutely be very successful while there is competition, simply by being the best 'competitor' in the eyes of the customers.

the ratio matters a lot. It's the difference between "we're all in this together" and "some of you won't make it but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make".

The vast majority of people don't know or care how much the person at the top is making, at all. They care only about if they're in good shape themselves. Someone who's making $100/hour and is living comfortably is, in 99% of cases not going to really give a shit if the CEO is making 50x what they are, or 500x.

That's the reality.

Thank you for bringing some reality to the table.

are they wrong though?

Yes.

There is a massive difference between someone who actively fights against their biases and doesn't let them dictate the conclusions they reach, and is always open to changing those conclusions and their way of thinking as new information comes to their attention, and someone who clings to those biases, and happily ignores anything that may challenge them.

I only define the latter category as "ideologues". Sure, technically everyone who is sapient has an ideology, but as the definition says:

an adherent of an ideology, especially one who is uncompromising and dogmatic.

I have a feeling you know very well that's the kind of person I was talking about. And no, not everyone is like that. On Reddit I was once called a "commie" and a "Nazi" on the same day by different people in different subs, lol, both in reaction to being told a fact that contradicted a bias of theirs. Those are the kind of people I'm talking about.

When people say it would cost x to solve world hunger, they are talking about those “underlying societal and infrastructure issues”.

And those issues cannot be fixed simply by throwing money at them, making "the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could end world hunger with a snap of their bony fingers" a deeply ignorant statement.

So, yes. Everything can be solved with money. You can hire people to “fundamentally understand local political dynamics”, invest in research, pay to fund the programs that will enable impoverished regions to develop the means to build the infrastructure to feed themselves.

And then the warlords steal the food and redistribute it as they see fit.

You're deeply naive about the reality of the circumstances in places where hunger is still a major problem.

The bottom line is, you can't truly solve world hunger until you solve world peace, and you can't solve world peace with money.

There are still places in the world where slavery is legal, for fuck's sake. Do you really, truly think things like this could still be true in 2024 if money and what/who you can buy/hire were actually the solution?

No, arbitrarily punishing a business for being too successful is both nonsensical, and has a chilling effect on new entrepreneurship. Also, it makes literally zero difference to someone earning $10/hour if one CEO is earning over $4000/hour, or if ten CEOs are each earning $400/hour.

Ultimately, the ratio itself doesn't matter at all. The actual number is what actually matters. Who do you think is more likely to be more resentful, someone making $10/hour under a CEO making 50x that, or someone making $100/hour under a CEO making 50x that? Obviously the first person...if they can't make ends meet, it's not going to make any difference to them if the CEO gets a pay cut, the fuck do they care?

Social media is used by a tiny minority of the population.

Thinking you can extrapolate what you see on social media into "the public" at large is the chief reason people on Reddit and Lemmy were so baffled when Harris got her ass kicked in the election.

Be more mindful of what's true of "the public", and what's true only in the echo chamber.

But it's inevitable as a successful business grows, and the population grows. A CEO of a company of 100 people does not have the same level of responsibility as the CEO of one employing hundreds of thousands (Google says UHC employs 440,000, for example).

Working conditions were inarguably much worse a century ago, but the gap wasn't anywhere close to 700x back then, was it? The gap was smaller not because the CEOs were more generous, it was just because the largest businesses were much smaller.

It's amazing how some people hate men so much that they'll go to bat harder for hypothetical women than actual men, who have been falsely accused.

Pitiful.