Discussions of wealth inequality tend to turn into abstract, dry articles full of numbers and graphs. It's hard to use these to compete with OMG I SAWS A STREET BUM WITH A CELLFONE!!1.
But it's Forbes Magazine, of all sources, which has solved this problem for us.
They looked at one of the most iconic visualizations of extreme wealth ever made:
J.R.R. Tolkein's illustration of Smaug the Dragon on his pile of treasure, from The Hobbit. It's pretty over-the-top, right? What a wild imagination Tolkein had!
I mean, unless everything we know about wealth inequality is wrong, having a hoard of gold like that makes you far richer than any real person who has ever lived. Right?
Actually, Forbes Magazine did the calculations and found that there are actual real-life billionaires with more money than what you're looking at.
55 of them, in fact.
Actually, there's 62 of them if you go by Bloomberg's list, and you should. [1] (Scroll to the bottom of the article for the details and number-crunching)
Let's look at that picture again:
Forbes Magazine, looking at the exact same illustration, calculated that it adds up to $14.7 billion. [2]
Consider that there's 62 people on the record as having more money than that. 16 people have inherited more money than that. Just let it sink in for a while.
Dragon hoards as a unit of measurement
We can now see the total net worth of top-200 billionaires who inherited their fortunes: $852,200,000,000 which is just a number, until you post the picture of Smaug...
58 times. I tried it here, but deleted it because I didn't want people's scroll-wheels to fall off. I'm not even going to try showing the cost of the Iraq War, seeing as 3 trillion looks like 204 dragon hoards, and it could rise as high as 408 Dragon Hoards.
So, instead I'll just show you how much the Koch Brothers have:
Use this the next time a conservative says something (say, volcano monitoring) is "unaffordable".
Demolishing the trickle down myth
The main reason people don't notice this inequality is because when rich people buy things, they're spending only a fraction of their money. Say what you will about the aristocrats who lived in the Palace of Versailles, at least their spending was employing people. While we do see some spectacular wastes of resources, like this converted Airbus A380, a private jet big enough to be a mansion, most of the wealth is simply hoarded.
So the job of this money is not just to waste economic resources on luxuries. It's main job is to simply be kept away from other people.
30% of the world's workforce is underemployed, with 9.2% being completely unemployed at any given moment. That wealth isn't trickling down. It's just sitting there. Like a dragon's hoard.
So what if they're rich, how can that affect me?
In the New Deal Era, it didn't really. It was part of the social contract that made America great: "you're allowed to have a lot more money than us, as long as you don't have a lot more political power than us". That's why we still call them "the wealthy" rather than simply "the powerful".
Smart rich people want to keep that social contract. Greed-blinded short-term thinkers are working to tear up the contract by helping translate wealth into political power. See the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling.
In times and places where money meant unlimited raw power, anyone who got wealthy became a threat to everyone else. Then you would see REAL class-warfare.
You would also see wars between rich people - like what happened as the Roman republic fell apart. Or look at the wars of succession in monarchies, with close relatives murdering each other. Nobles weren't any more psychopathic than people today - they just had to adapt to the kill-or-be-killed environment of politicized wealth.
Consider the Wars of The Roses: after a battle, the losing nobles would be executed, and the lower-class prisoners simply told to go home. The exact opposite of who dies in today's wars - probably the only rich person to die in the War on Terror was Osama Bin Laden. (Forbes counted the wealthiest veterans in 2011, the wealthiest one, a WW2 veteran, is today #94 on the Forbes list.)
Rich people waging war on each other sounds like something you only find in history books - like mercenaries, sorry, private military contractors. Just think of all the bitter lawsuits going on right now, and imagine all those courtroom battles replaced with actual battles.
Smart money knows that a separation of wealth and power is the best way to protect the wealthy. Sort of like how separation of Church and State probably does more to protect the churches than the state. The Koch Bros. and company would get this if they stopped thinking with only the reptilian part of their brains.
You all know what happened to Smaug in the end, right? If only Smaug had traded hoarding and displays of power for a life of paying taxes and minding his own business.
...
NITPICKERS SECTION:
1. As an actual top billionaire, Bloomberg knows how to find stuff that Forbes misses. The only problem with Bloomberg's list is that, for no reason, Bloomberg himself is not on it. So I added +1 to compensate for that.)
2. For the fanboys: Forbes concluded, based on the same illustration: "Gold & Silver in Main Mound: $14.7 billion". Since the whole point of this exercise is to visualize the fortune, I'm not counting Smaug's other forms of wealth, which are not visible in the illustration. You can't see the diamonds on his belly, or the "outer mounds", or the "unseen floors", and the Arkenstone is just a sparkle. I'm not trying to take the epicness of The Hobbit down a notch. The Hobbit is and always will be totally epic.
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