idle speculation on money and power.

[archanis]

what do you think would happen if you got rid of the richest 25% of the worlds population? obviously the population would go down 25%... but if the money was still there, in the companies, in the banks, in the investments... its just the people gone... what do you think would happen?

i want as many opinions as possible. i dont care if their biast, i dont care if their not based on logic (U.S. residents, this is for us!) i dont care if they say dogs are fluffy and rich people are bad, i just want as many honest heart felt (another thing that would increase! honesty!) responses as possible.

ive opened up a cage of wolves, and i want to see how many bite. lets hear it people!

[Gummiente]

what do you think would happen if you got rid of the richest 25% of the worlds population? obviously the population would go down 25%... but if the money was still there, in the companies, in the banks, in the investments... its just the people gone... what do you think would happen?

Well, I dunno... do we get the keys to their safety deposit boxes and access to their bank accounts before they mysteriously vanish?

[archanis]

sure, why not. but if that happend, the situation would not improve. rich idiots would be replaced by poor idiots.

[Keyoke]

They'd be quite quickly replaced with another bunch of rich idiots - whichever ones got hold of the cash first. there would just be less people on the world....

[archanis]

yea... but i was hoping to get an optimist to poste here...

[Keyoke]

Well the optimistic opinion would be that the money would filter down evenly through the working clas, leading to a world filled with nothing but euphoria. World peace would reign supreme and a new paradise would be available to all.

Think my first post is more likely, though....

[9000white]

the money would naturally go to needy motorcycle riders like me.

[cb360]

I don't want to burst anyone's bubble... but probably almost without exception the people reading this website are easily among the richest 25% people in the world. By quite a fair margin I'd imagine. Virtually everyone in America, Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, etc would be excluded by default if they have their own house or apartment and a private vehicle to drive.

I certainly realize the human predilection to want more than you have and I'm as guilty as the next person. But sticking to the question asked... we won't be the ones dividing up what's left. It'll be the rest of the world's population dividing up our stuff. It's easy to get caught up in our own thing and forget just how mind-numbingly poor a great deal of the world is. There are billions of people who exist on subsistence farming.

If the richest 25% are cancelled out, most of us will be among the missing and there will be a bunch of farmers riding their new motorcycles out to their dirt patch. There's a natural reaction to include ourselves among the downtrodden when we see so much excess by those who have more. But make no mistake about it... when you are considering the whole planet's population... we are the haves, not the have-nots.

[oldnslo]

I'm with you, CB. Thing is, the farmers would have no new motorcycles, because the people that make and market them are in the 25% also. We would be forced to return to the days of the farm just for production of food to survive, and manufacturers of soft and hard goods would be walking a fine line between earning too much on what they sell, which would make them part of the 25%, or not making enough to stay in business. It would makefor a strange world indeed. We would be immediately thrust back to the beginning of the industrial age.

[blair]

I don't want to burst anyone's bubble... but probably almost without exception the people reading this website are easily among the richest 25% people in the world.

19% of those polled believed they were in the top 1% of wealth in America.

Which is a fact hidden and used by the real 1% to manipulate them.