Fixing poverty in four little steps

[All Mankind]

1. Take a part of the world's surplus money, let's say just 10% of the fortune of the wealthiest 20% (18 000 000 000 000 dollars American at a conservative count), and put it in a fund of some sort. They wont have time to miss it before it flows back to them with interest!
2. Based on this four-year Ugandan project, give this money out to applicants who provide a plan for how they're going to study, practice or buy hardware to benefit from this grant. If as many as the poorer four billion humans apply, the money should be sufficient to give each of them at least ten times more than the Ugandans got per head. And if that sounds low, remember there's a shitload more cash lying around where it doesn't do any good.
3. Wait four to ten years.
4. ?????
4. Profit. There's no mystery involved. We just go straight to the profit.

[Bells]

i MIGHT be mistaken but i don't think i am...

a "Fund of some sort" is not cloning center for wealth, the interest has to come from somewhere. Banks need to be able to PAY that interest.

If that wasn't the case, the solution would be just to print more money. which was already done in the US (if memory recalls) and didn't do much above the diddly squat line

[phil_]

Originally Posted by Bells

i MIGHT be mistaken but i don't think i am...

a "Fund of some sort" is not cloning center for wealth, the interest has to come from somewhere. Banks need to be able to PAY that interest.

The "interest" in this case isn't from an agreed upon repayment plan like interest in a bank. The meaning of the statement is that, given money's tendency to flow upward to richer and richer people and almost never go back down, the 18 trillion dollars taken will "return" to those it was taken from quickly, in that they will make another 18 trillion dollars in short order just as they currently do. The point is that this wouldn't hurt the super rich in the slightest financially, it would just hurt their feelings.

The interest metaphor is a way shorter way of writing all that, though.

[Krylo]

In economics, when wealth moves it increases. Wealth which does not move stagnates.

It's not even really about how it moves up or whatever (though that's also a good point), but the fact that so long as wealth circulates it continues to increase.

This can be proven with a simple thought exercise.

What happens when you give poor people money?

Well depending on HOW poor, they either buy things they need, or buy things to produce what they need.

In the former case, the demand of things goes up, this tells the people at the top to hire more people to produce and sell said things. This means more people have money to buy things, and the cycle continues until unemployment reaches near zero levels and everyone is both producing and consuming (I.E. very little or no poor). Therefore the poor become wealthier by virtue of being given enough money to buy things, being able to get new jobs that have been created, etc. etc., and the rich become wealthier than they started by profit margins on all the things they're selling that they couldn't sell before.

In the latter case, all of the above happens, but on top of that you also have more food/housing/other things that could be defined as wealth being produced by the poor in question, making over all wealth increase even faster.

Hoarding money as a wealthy person doesn't actually make you richer. It makes everyone else poorer, and monopolizes power, not wealth or comfort, in your hands.

[All Mankind]

Originally Posted by Bells

i MIGHT be mistaken but i don't think i am...

a "Fund of some sort" is not cloning center for wealth, the interest has to come from somewhere. Banks need to be able to PAY that interest.

If that wasn't the case, the solution would be just to print more money. which was already done in the US (if memory recalls) and didn't do much above the diddly squat line

Yeah, we can see where you're mistaken, understandably, as we were perhaps not entirely clear. This fund wouldn't grow or anything, it's just a pool where we put the money to give it away more easily. There's no plan to get a return on this investment, we're just trusting that the globally improving living conditions will result in more money trickling back to the "donors" over the following decades.

It's not like we're talking of doing anything crazy, like redistributing all the world's wealth evenly to give every adult person 51 400 dollars in their pocket; just a small scale, responsible social experiment where every indication predicts positive results for everyone.

[Aerozord]

This isn't anything new, this is what we already do, people are taxed and that money is used for systems like welfare, social security, and grants.

[All Mankind]

Well, apparently we could be doing a lot more of it with little risk to anyone, due to the sheer scale of economic imbalance that exists