So, to pre-empt a counterargument: It is true, just as numbers, this is a naive calculation. Money does not necessarily equal actually produced goods and services, and a lot of that wealth is not liquid. So, ending poverty is more complicated than just taking money. But reducing it to that, is usually also a straw man.
Firstly: This still means that there has been an increasing flow of actual influence and liquid wealth from the bottom to the top. Just as market dynamics tend to create - consolidation of capital. And with it, markets are less and less capable to service the needs of people.
Then: All that non-liquid money, even if it couldn’t be translated easily into ending poverty without further reforms, is also a tremendous, obscene power base, that kings of old would have only dreamt of, reaching globally. As investments within the purview of the 1%, they at best service their personal human fancies and interests, which can even be philanthropic at times, but even then cannot undo the damage that was necessary to exist for the wealth to be concentrated like that in the first place - and at worst service a rather cold, purely “logical” short-term profit incentive in bundled investments, where even that miniscule human touch of personal fancies has been removed. Having that wealth - or its equivalent in labour power and resources - under the control of 1% of humanity, is deeply undemocratic and follows the logic of further and further concentration of wealth within that system - and history has shown this to happen at the cost of human dignity and life.
And lastly: Even if it gets more complicated than just “take money from the rich and give it to the poor” - that does not mean, that the status quo is not perverse and that redistributing that money is not meaningful. It just means that the social functions of money (investments regulating production; managing access to who gets their needs met and who doesn’t; Regulating what wants beyond needs get fulfilled for whom), have to be re-thought and re-structured more fundamentally - after taking that money to already allow for human dignity and more sustainable investments even within the status quo.
So, to pre-empt a counterargument: It is true, just as numbers, this is a naive calculation. Money does not necessarily equal actually produced goods and services, and a lot of that wealth is not liquid. So, ending poverty is more complicated than just taking money. But reducing it to that, is usually also a straw man.
Firstly: This still means that there has been an increasing flow of actual influence and liquid wealth from the bottom to the top. Just as market dynamics tend to create - consolidation of capital. And with it, markets are less and less capable to service the needs of people.
Then: All that non-liquid money, even if it couldn’t be translated easily into ending poverty without further reforms, is also a tremendous, obscene power base, that kings of old would have only dreamt of, reaching globally. As investments within the purview of the 1%, they at best service their personal human fancies and interests, which can even be philanthropic at times, but even then cannot undo the damage that was necessary to exist for the wealth to be concentrated like that in the first place - and at worst service a rather cold, purely “logical” short-term profit incentive in bundled investments, where even that miniscule human touch of personal fancies has been removed. Having that wealth - or its equivalent in labour power and resources - under the control of 1% of humanity, is deeply undemocratic and follows the logic of further and further concentration of wealth within that system - and history has shown this to happen at the cost of human dignity and life.
And lastly: Even if it gets more complicated than just “take money from the rich and give it to the poor” - that does not mean, that the status quo is not perverse and that redistributing that money is not meaningful. It just means that the social functions of money (investments regulating production; managing access to who gets their needs met and who doesn’t; Regulating what wants beyond needs get fulfilled for whom), have to be re-thought and re-structured more fundamentally - after taking that money to already allow for human dignity and more sustainable investments even within the status quo.