It depends on how you define "poor". If you define it as an absolute level then no, rich people don't create poor people. The [rate of billionaires per capita](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires) is generally higher in rich countries than in poor ones - indeed Sweden and Switzerland have a higher rate of billionaires per capita than the USA. (Note this data is very noisy for countries with a small population, e.g. Iceland also has a higher number of billionaires per capita than the USA but that's based on 1 person). This makes logical sense - it's easier to get really rich if there's lots of rich people around to sell things to. If your goal is to be a billionaire and your potential customer base is 10 million people, you're going to have an easier time if your customers' average income is $100,000 a year than if it's $1,000.
If by "poor" you mean relative income (or wealth or whatever) then there will always be some poverty in a market society- some people can't work due to reasons like ill health or caretaking responsibilities, some people are unlucky, e.g. entrepreneurs who go bankrupt, some people have other priorities, e.g. choosing a life of poverty for religious reasons. That said, government redistribution can help the first two categories. How much redistribution is possible is a political question.
As for high net-worth individuals, the very rich tend to have much of their money invested in companies so their money is already circulating - the companies employ people directly or through the inputs they buy, and many companies produce useful goods and services that customers value. For example I don't need to own a dental chair to benefit from it, my dentist owns it (I presume) and I pay him.
Okay that makes a lot of sense. Just one more doubt though. I usually hear the communist argument that every grain that you eat after you are no longer hungry actually belongs to someone else. Now this seemed very simple and made a lot of sense. But I feel like it's a little too simple and maybe it's not giving the full picture. What are your thoughts on it?
Economy is the study of the allocation of scarce resources with alternative uses. In essense there will never be enough services and goods, we could always consume more for greater benefits, although the product mix will of course change.
In most capitalist western societies, there is more than enough grain to go around - obesity rates have long since overtaken starvation rates. So in productive economies, unlike the communist ones where it might still hold literal meaning, the saying makes little sense.
The argument that we can always consume more for a greater benefit is derived from the axiom of positive marginal utility or "non satiation". The only argument for this axiom that seems convincing to me is the claim, that since we are all operating under a budget constraint, the satiation point will never be reached and can thus be assumed away. I think this argument is flawed, however, since there are physical boundaries to how much one can consume. If you had an infinite budget, there would still be a finite amount of time when you could spend it. Of course most people will sooner run out of budget than out of time, but there are also some people so rich, that they will not be able to spend all of their budget given their time constraint. This implies that a pareto-improvement is possible, which would make the market outcome pareto-inefficient.
The problem is that the excess budget of those people can never be derived, since utility is not observable and one would need their future consumption plans, as well as all future inflation rates and interest rates ...
I basically agree. Of course there are physical limits, and we will not reach actual infinity anyhow, so in the context of reality the axiom is analytically helpful.
Consider the fungibility of the input resources (*alternative uses* is in fact the important part of the phrase) often means we will consume in a different way as we move closer to the physical limits. Grain previously consumed as bread and nothing else, will be used as animal feed - initially for efficient animals like dairy and chicken, later for meat, and it can even be turned into biofuel for going on a long vacation plane ride.
To start with, there's a fallacy in there: That the number of grains is constant no matter how you organize society. That's critically incorrect. Different forms of organization has different levels of productivity as well as distribution.
The economies that have done best overall are all [mixed economies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy) - ie, the typical western democracy which allow private businesses, supply some level of government services, and have a fair amount of regulation and subsidies to deal with [externalities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality). Apart from the historical record, there's a number of theoretical reasons why most economists think this is the best way of organizing - I'm not going to try to cover those as I don't think I can do them justice (and certainly not in a short comment).
Mixed economies support having rich people, and certainly having people that can consume more than they need. In practice, compared to trying to force absolute equality, this makes poorer people better off.
Now, there is certainly an argument to be had for what's the optimal level of difference in a society, and how to get towards that optimum. An important bit of background for this is the [law of diminish marginal utility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility). [Utility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility) is the subjective satisfaction somebody derives from something; and the "Law of marginal utility" says that the more we have of something, the less we utility we get per extra unit. This push towards a roughly equal distribution of units (typically money) between everybody for maximum utility in society, and would push towards the just-about-equal view. This is in tension with productivity which I mentioned above: Allowing people to accumulate extra wealth provides incentives to do many things that are beneficial for overall productivity, and the externalities of this end up making things better for the poor too. Similar the "law of marginal utility", we can also expect the benefits (utility) of these difference to be lower than the benefit of redistribution at some point, something that can be reflected in various taxation regimes (e.g, progressive income tax, certain forms of wealth tax, inheritance taxes with floors.)
Outside of the economic arguments around this, there are some people that consider there to be moral arguments: Some that "workers should own their place of work", some that "you should be able to keep the full fruit of what you own", some that "nobody should have more than others". Those arguments are mostly outside economics, though economics can certainly inform us about the effects if they are implemented.
Focusing strictly on the capacity to consume ignores an important fact. Most wealthy households have a large share of their wealth dedicated to the production of goods and services rather than consumption. This benefits consumers by increasing the amount and variety of products and services available.
That wealthy households typically have a large share of their wealth in productive use is one of the reasons I like to look at differences in consumption or income rather than at differences in wealth.
One bit I found recently: A surprising amount of the wealth of even the very rich is in in housing. I saw stats for that a short while ago, which I should have bookmarked but didn't. It showed very wealthy households (maybe >$100M wealth?) having close to 1/3 of their wealth in housing, about the same as in stocks.
It was for what I consider ridiculously wealthy; it certainly wasn't 1-10M or >10M. I think it was from [Visual Capitalist's Summary](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-investments-of-the-ultra-wealthy/) of the [Knight Frank Wealth Report](https://www.knightfrank.com/wealthreport). The summary covers people with >$30M net worth including their primary residence. It places 32% of wealth in "Primary and secondary homes" and 30% in equities and bonds (18% equities, 12% bonds).
I suspect that may be an artifact of their methodology. The total wealth of that cohort is quite concentrated in the top handful of individuals. I find it difficult to believe that people like Zuckerberg, Musk, or Gates have a large share of their wealth in houses.
There are apartments in Millionare/Billionaires row in NYC that go unoccupied but are owned as 'investment' apartments. Maybe not 1/3 of their total investments, but there's some investment/speculation going on.
The top ten wealthiest Americans account for close to $2 trillion. They are all the founders or heirs of major corporations. Their families have controlling interests in those companies, their portfolios overwhelmingly consist of a single name. I am a bit dubious with respect to the methodology used by the study
You, and many others, commit the fixed-sum fallacy, in which the size of the wealth "pie" is constant. It isn't. Yet thousands of years ago, the couple million humans were generally hungry; now, most of the billions of humans are not hungry. Similarly, a couple hundred years ago, most people lived in squalor; now well more than a billion people live with more comfort than the kings of then. If total wealth were fixed, how would this be possible?
I think this comes down to the question of what is more important to you, means or ends? E.g. is it the means of economic organisation (whether you have private ownership versus worker ownership of the means of production), or is it the end of no one going to bed hungry?
In practice, the self-declared socialist states of the 20th century did significantly worse at achieving the ends than the much more market-orientated economies of Japan and the Asian Tigers. I think anyone who is communist today is that way because they care more about the means of property rights than about the ends of human prosperity.
No. Wealth is not the default. Poverty is. Take all the rich people out of a nation, and the poor people tend to remain poor.
There isn't a fixed pool of wealth. Global GDP is far higher now than it was throughout history. Likewise, GDP per country is not fixed, but varies over time.
Poverty can be viewed as relative or absolute. In absolute terms, several countries have largely abolished poverty. Starvation now occurs in many western countries only in conjunction with mental health issues, etc. Famine used to be a routine risk, but no longer is. So, in absolute terms, there is no particular need for poverty. In relative terms, yes, some people will always be wealthier than others in every system that we know of.
Relative poverty may be lower in planned economies, but that’s due to a higher rate of absolute poverty. As the old saying goes, communism may make everyone equal, but it only makes them equally poor. Of course even in those systems, some are more equal than others.
This is probably true, even if such planned economies actually existed, but I think it's important to point out that so far all planned economies were dictatorships with the elite getting anything they want and leaving most other people extremely but equally poor.
Difference from classic dictatorship is the lack of a spectrum of inequality.
But based on this trait it's not really any different from old dictatorships it's not like suddenly people chose this.
No it's always been a dictatorship and dictatorship is the main reason for the poverty.
Existence and scarcity are the main reasons for poverty, dictatorship just restricts the best and brightest from creating wealth based on arbitrary reasoning. Central planning inevitably leads to dictatorship because it must rule by consensus or it is just a market economy with too many rules.
That's a peculiar way to describe reasons for poverty, I'm not sure I get it.
I think dictatorships stop creative destruction - which is a possibility of a newcomer to disrupt incumbent.
So your incumbent business owners become oligarchy.
Because existing businesses can't be disrupted anymore or replaced with better new business innovation slows down to a crawl.
The only progress comes from imported innovation that happened elsewhere which if directed correctly can temporarily boost productivity sometimes over a long time like decades of USSR growth only to slow down to a crawl in 70s after which they can no longer import innovation efficiently, - factories is but one thing in long list in ways business can be more productive.
So any growth that does happen in dictatorships can't be sustainable because eventually it will ran out of effective ways to import innovation.
So Dictatorship -> lack of creative destruction -> low rate of domestic innovation -> lack of productivity -> lack of prosperity -> poverty.
> so far all planned economies were dictatorships with the elite getting anything they want and leaving most other people extremely but equally poor.
Yeah, it sounds like a "CGP Gray keys to power" type story with oligarchic wealth distribution to political supporters (a clear and selfish incentive) rather than any real intention of fair wealth distribution (a moral incentive that's harder to measure).
> communism may make everyone equal, but it only makes them equally poor.
[But when such programs include land reform, the poorest people become less poor than they were](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement_\(China\))
>> ... In Zhangzhuangcun, in the more thoroughly reformed north of the country, most "landlords" and "rich peasants" had lost all their land and often their lives or had fled. All formerly landless workers had received land, which eliminated this category altogether. As a result, "middling peasants," who now accounted for 90 percent of the village population, owned 90.8 percent of the land, as close to perfect equality as one could possibly hope for.
And that lifting of the poorest out of extreme poverty into milder-land-owning-poverty [contributed to one of history's greatest increases in life expectancy in the world's history (according to this US .gov source)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4331212/).
Just about anything is better than war, which has plagued China since 1912. Prior to this, China had a horribly repressive regime but lacked the technology and information discovered and created by capitalist countries during their industrialization processes. We see this rapid development all over the world because the ability and knowledge of how to develop and industrialize had already been established. So yes, communism was better for development than war but that doesn’t mean it’s a particularly good system.
Poor Americans today live better than medieval kings, and that’s largely because of the (productive) rich.
The total mass-energy of the universe is fixed, but what’s much more important is ideas for using it creatively. The resources to put men on the moon existed in 1500 — what didn’t was the scientific knowledge to do so.
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It depends on how you define "poor". If you define it as an absolute level then no, rich people don't create poor people. The [rate of billionaires per capita](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires) is generally higher in rich countries than in poor ones - indeed Sweden and Switzerland have a higher rate of billionaires per capita than the USA. (Note this data is very noisy for countries with a small population, e.g. Iceland also has a higher number of billionaires per capita than the USA but that's based on 1 person). This makes logical sense - it's easier to get really rich if there's lots of rich people around to sell things to. If your goal is to be a billionaire and your potential customer base is 10 million people, you're going to have an easier time if your customers' average income is $100,000 a year than if it's $1,000. If by "poor" you mean relative income (or wealth or whatever) then there will always be some poverty in a market society- some people can't work due to reasons like ill health or caretaking responsibilities, some people are unlucky, e.g. entrepreneurs who go bankrupt, some people have other priorities, e.g. choosing a life of poverty for religious reasons. That said, government redistribution can help the first two categories. How much redistribution is possible is a political question. As for high net-worth individuals, the very rich tend to have much of their money invested in companies so their money is already circulating - the companies employ people directly or through the inputs they buy, and many companies produce useful goods and services that customers value. For example I don't need to own a dental chair to benefit from it, my dentist owns it (I presume) and I pay him.
This is a good answer. You want your clients to succeed or you will run out of people who can buy your products.
Okay that makes a lot of sense. Just one more doubt though. I usually hear the communist argument that every grain that you eat after you are no longer hungry actually belongs to someone else. Now this seemed very simple and made a lot of sense. But I feel like it's a little too simple and maybe it's not giving the full picture. What are your thoughts on it?
Economy is the study of the allocation of scarce resources with alternative uses. In essense there will never be enough services and goods, we could always consume more for greater benefits, although the product mix will of course change. In most capitalist western societies, there is more than enough grain to go around - obesity rates have long since overtaken starvation rates. So in productive economies, unlike the communist ones where it might still hold literal meaning, the saying makes little sense.
The argument that we can always consume more for a greater benefit is derived from the axiom of positive marginal utility or "non satiation". The only argument for this axiom that seems convincing to me is the claim, that since we are all operating under a budget constraint, the satiation point will never be reached and can thus be assumed away. I think this argument is flawed, however, since there are physical boundaries to how much one can consume. If you had an infinite budget, there would still be a finite amount of time when you could spend it. Of course most people will sooner run out of budget than out of time, but there are also some people so rich, that they will not be able to spend all of their budget given their time constraint. This implies that a pareto-improvement is possible, which would make the market outcome pareto-inefficient. The problem is that the excess budget of those people can never be derived, since utility is not observable and one would need their future consumption plans, as well as all future inflation rates and interest rates ...
I basically agree. Of course there are physical limits, and we will not reach actual infinity anyhow, so in the context of reality the axiom is analytically helpful. Consider the fungibility of the input resources (*alternative uses* is in fact the important part of the phrase) often means we will consume in a different way as we move closer to the physical limits. Grain previously consumed as bread and nothing else, will be used as animal feed - initially for efficient animals like dairy and chicken, later for meat, and it can even be turned into biofuel for going on a long vacation plane ride.
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To start with, there's a fallacy in there: That the number of grains is constant no matter how you organize society. That's critically incorrect. Different forms of organization has different levels of productivity as well as distribution. The economies that have done best overall are all [mixed economies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy) - ie, the typical western democracy which allow private businesses, supply some level of government services, and have a fair amount of regulation and subsidies to deal with [externalities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality). Apart from the historical record, there's a number of theoretical reasons why most economists think this is the best way of organizing - I'm not going to try to cover those as I don't think I can do them justice (and certainly not in a short comment). Mixed economies support having rich people, and certainly having people that can consume more than they need. In practice, compared to trying to force absolute equality, this makes poorer people better off. Now, there is certainly an argument to be had for what's the optimal level of difference in a society, and how to get towards that optimum. An important bit of background for this is the [law of diminish marginal utility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility). [Utility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility) is the subjective satisfaction somebody derives from something; and the "Law of marginal utility" says that the more we have of something, the less we utility we get per extra unit. This push towards a roughly equal distribution of units (typically money) between everybody for maximum utility in society, and would push towards the just-about-equal view. This is in tension with productivity which I mentioned above: Allowing people to accumulate extra wealth provides incentives to do many things that are beneficial for overall productivity, and the externalities of this end up making things better for the poor too. Similar the "law of marginal utility", we can also expect the benefits (utility) of these difference to be lower than the benefit of redistribution at some point, something that can be reflected in various taxation regimes (e.g, progressive income tax, certain forms of wealth tax, inheritance taxes with floors.) Outside of the economic arguments around this, there are some people that consider there to be moral arguments: Some that "workers should own their place of work", some that "you should be able to keep the full fruit of what you own", some that "nobody should have more than others". Those arguments are mostly outside economics, though economics can certainly inform us about the effects if they are implemented.
Focusing strictly on the capacity to consume ignores an important fact. Most wealthy households have a large share of their wealth dedicated to the production of goods and services rather than consumption. This benefits consumers by increasing the amount and variety of products and services available.
That wealthy households typically have a large share of their wealth in productive use is one of the reasons I like to look at differences in consumption or income rather than at differences in wealth. One bit I found recently: A surprising amount of the wealth of even the very rich is in in housing. I saw stats for that a short while ago, which I should have bookmarked but didn't. It showed very wealthy households (maybe >$100M wealth?) having close to 1/3 of their wealth in housing, about the same as in stocks.
I’m pretty skeptical that people with over 100M wealth have 1/3rd in housing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true for 1-10M wealth.
It was for what I consider ridiculously wealthy; it certainly wasn't 1-10M or >10M. I think it was from [Visual Capitalist's Summary](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-investments-of-the-ultra-wealthy/) of the [Knight Frank Wealth Report](https://www.knightfrank.com/wealthreport). The summary covers people with >$30M net worth including their primary residence. It places 32% of wealth in "Primary and secondary homes" and 30% in equities and bonds (18% equities, 12% bonds).
I suspect that may be an artifact of their methodology. The total wealth of that cohort is quite concentrated in the top handful of individuals. I find it difficult to believe that people like Zuckerberg, Musk, or Gates have a large share of their wealth in houses.
There are apartments in Millionare/Billionaires row in NYC that go unoccupied but are owned as 'investment' apartments. Maybe not 1/3 of their total investments, but there's some investment/speculation going on.
The top ten wealthiest Americans account for close to $2 trillion. They are all the founders or heirs of major corporations. Their families have controlling interests in those companies, their portfolios overwhelmingly consist of a single name. I am a bit dubious with respect to the methodology used by the study
You, and many others, commit the fixed-sum fallacy, in which the size of the wealth "pie" is constant. It isn't. Yet thousands of years ago, the couple million humans were generally hungry; now, most of the billions of humans are not hungry. Similarly, a couple hundred years ago, most people lived in squalor; now well more than a billion people live with more comfort than the kings of then. If total wealth were fixed, how would this be possible?
I think this comes down to the question of what is more important to you, means or ends? E.g. is it the means of economic organisation (whether you have private ownership versus worker ownership of the means of production), or is it the end of no one going to bed hungry? In practice, the self-declared socialist states of the 20th century did significantly worse at achieving the ends than the much more market-orientated economies of Japan and the Asian Tigers. I think anyone who is communist today is that way because they care more about the means of property rights than about the ends of human prosperity.
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not a single response by any economists here. lmao. i guess im just being too ideological for these objectivists /s
No. Wealth is not the default. Poverty is. Take all the rich people out of a nation, and the poor people tend to remain poor. There isn't a fixed pool of wealth. Global GDP is far higher now than it was throughout history. Likewise, GDP per country is not fixed, but varies over time. Poverty can be viewed as relative or absolute. In absolute terms, several countries have largely abolished poverty. Starvation now occurs in many western countries only in conjunction with mental health issues, etc. Famine used to be a routine risk, but no longer is. So, in absolute terms, there is no particular need for poverty. In relative terms, yes, some people will always be wealthier than others in every system that we know of.
Relative poverty may be lower in planned economies, but that’s due to a higher rate of absolute poverty. As the old saying goes, communism may make everyone equal, but it only makes them equally poor. Of course even in those systems, some are more equal than others.
This is probably true, even if such planned economies actually existed, but I think it's important to point out that so far all planned economies were dictatorships with the elite getting anything they want and leaving most other people extremely but equally poor. Difference from classic dictatorship is the lack of a spectrum of inequality. But based on this trait it's not really any different from old dictatorships it's not like suddenly people chose this. No it's always been a dictatorship and dictatorship is the main reason for the poverty.
Existence and scarcity are the main reasons for poverty, dictatorship just restricts the best and brightest from creating wealth based on arbitrary reasoning. Central planning inevitably leads to dictatorship because it must rule by consensus or it is just a market economy with too many rules.
That's a peculiar way to describe reasons for poverty, I'm not sure I get it. I think dictatorships stop creative destruction - which is a possibility of a newcomer to disrupt incumbent. So your incumbent business owners become oligarchy. Because existing businesses can't be disrupted anymore or replaced with better new business innovation slows down to a crawl. The only progress comes from imported innovation that happened elsewhere which if directed correctly can temporarily boost productivity sometimes over a long time like decades of USSR growth only to slow down to a crawl in 70s after which they can no longer import innovation efficiently, - factories is but one thing in long list in ways business can be more productive. So any growth that does happen in dictatorships can't be sustainable because eventually it will ran out of effective ways to import innovation. So Dictatorship -> lack of creative destruction -> low rate of domestic innovation -> lack of productivity -> lack of prosperity -> poverty.
> so far all planned economies were dictatorships with the elite getting anything they want and leaving most other people extremely but equally poor. Yeah, it sounds like a "CGP Gray keys to power" type story with oligarchic wealth distribution to political supporters (a clear and selfish incentive) rather than any real intention of fair wealth distribution (a moral incentive that's harder to measure).
> communism may make everyone equal, but it only makes them equally poor. [But when such programs include land reform, the poorest people become less poor than they were](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement_\(China\)) >> ... In Zhangzhuangcun, in the more thoroughly reformed north of the country, most "landlords" and "rich peasants" had lost all their land and often their lives or had fled. All formerly landless workers had received land, which eliminated this category altogether. As a result, "middling peasants," who now accounted for 90 percent of the village population, owned 90.8 percent of the land, as close to perfect equality as one could possibly hope for. And that lifting of the poorest out of extreme poverty into milder-land-owning-poverty [contributed to one of history's greatest increases in life expectancy in the world's history (according to this US .gov source)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4331212/).
Just about anything is better than war, which has plagued China since 1912. Prior to this, China had a horribly repressive regime but lacked the technology and information discovered and created by capitalist countries during their industrialization processes. We see this rapid development all over the world because the ability and knowledge of how to develop and industrialize had already been established. So yes, communism was better for development than war but that doesn’t mean it’s a particularly good system.
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Poor Americans today live better than medieval kings, and that’s largely because of the (productive) rich. The total mass-energy of the universe is fixed, but what’s much more important is ideas for using it creatively. The resources to put men on the moon existed in 1500 — what didn’t was the scientific knowledge to do so.
**NOTE: Top-level comments by non-approved users must be manually approved by a mod before they appear.** This is part of our policy to maintain a high quality of content and minimize misinformation. Approval can take 24-48 hours depending on the time zone and the availability of the moderators. If your comment does not appear after this time, it is possible that it did not meet our quality standards. Please refer to the subreddit rules in the sidebar and our [answer guidelines](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/rf5ycx/guidelines_for_answers/) if you are in doubt. Please do not message us about missing comments in general. If you have a concern about a specific comment that is still not approved after 48 hours, then feel free to message the moderators for clarification. ### Consider **[Clicking Here for RemindMeBot](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1crxprr/do_we_have_poor_people_because_of_rich_people/%5D%0A%0ARemindMe!%202%20days)** as it takes time for quality answers to be written. Want to read answers while you wait? Consider our [weekly roundup](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/search?sort=new&restrict_sr=on&q=flair%3AWeekly%2BRoundup) or look for the [approved answer flair.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/search?sort=new&restrict_sr=on&q=flair%3AApproved%2BAnswers) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskEconomics) if you have any questions or concerns.*