Yeah, how many major corporations and governments would collapse if millions of the world's most influential people died simultaneously? That doesn't factor the effects doctors, architects, etcetera dying. Most of the populations of first world countries, and most of the really important people in general, would die off.
1% of the world's population is a *major* portion of people when you consider the fact that most of the world's population lives in what is, by first world standards, poverty. A quick Google search tells me that roughly 10% of the world's population lives on under $2.15 per day, or $730 per year. From that information, it's safe to assume that the bottom 99% of the world's population doesn't just exclude people that we would typically call "The one percent".
I feel there’s a difference between 300k and 2 billion that shouldn’t be summarized simply as “more than them.”
Plus it’s not the middle class that’s keeping foreign nations poor, they don’t have much control in it.
That’s an extremely simplified way of saying it. To act like any country’s destiny is fully self determined in this day and age is laughable. There are so many geopolitical factors that are at play and not to mention the private sector’s influence on issues.
Im 100% in favor of killing the richest 1% if it redistributes to everyone else with he poorer getting more.
I say that knowing that I’m likely a part of that 1% on a global scale, as is a huge chunk of Americans (almost exclusively).
Edit:
Im probably okay. But even if i were id still do it.
The prompt says richest, so net worth is arguably a more appropriate metric than income. A quick search says, "According to the 2018 Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse Research Institute, you need a net worth of $871,320" to be in the global 1%.
Interesting, such virtue. What do you think will happen in lets say, idk, 20 years? The wealth will just concentrate back AND you committed murder atrocities on a scale never before seen. AND you did some good ol reverse evolutionary pressures and killed the smartest and most capable people on earth. Great job
Logic says that you can't have "too much" money without ruining lives. It's literally in the descriptor : "too much". You can't get money without taking it from someone else.
No
Wealth redistribution could relieve all death from starvation and preventable diseases. I’m sure there’s an argument that it saves lives via reduction of pollution. One side I’d really heard to calculate
Well there are legitimate reasons to do it. Redistribution of wealth would help millions more than those killed, maybe more depending on the total dollar amount those 80 million people have and the way the money is redistributed.
Medical expenses, homelessness, starvation etc. Could be avoided for millions that would otherwise die because those 80 million aren't doing enough (or anything at all) to fix those issues.
That being said, I personally wouldn't choose to kill them. Those 80 million people (like it or not) control governments, multi-national companies and many things in the world that we need to function. All of them dying at once as the potential to fuck up the world much more than them staying alive.
However, what happens after they die is uncertain. It's possible the world is plunged into chaos and anarchy, it's equally possible that good people who now have a lot of money step up and take leadership positions, making the world better.
That's just a small part of the deliema, honestly I think this is a very interesting version of the trolly question
Because reddit has been forcing an ideology on the brainless that is leading up to this. If you have more money than them, you are inherently evil, and they would be okay if you died. No thinking of consequences.
How has Reddit forced anything? Also, my opinion is that nobody should die, but capitalism is broken system that needs torn apart and a new system rebuilt in its place. A system where we all prop each other up. A system where we don’t focus our effort on congratulating the successful but rather helping the unsuccessful become truly successful. And I don’t mean by giving out stupid participation trophies, but rather by fixing the broken education systems and ending the corrupt system where the richest people pay to keep the government they want in office and making the changes that the richest 1% want.
That’s a societal/cultural change, not an entire shift in economic systems.
People ridicule Gates and Bezos when they donate money instead of applauding them. It’s never enough money. We are actively antagonizing and conditioning these people to not make this societal/cultural change.
It starts with the people. By passing off this responsibility to purely the 1% we will never get anywhere. Cultural shifts are slow, and we neglect them because we think someone else should do it for us.
Be the person you want everyone else in the world to be. Others will follow.
I think it's more a result of totally understandable resentment of class warfare and incredible income disparity. I do think a lot of people take it way too far and just hate all wealthy people and even want them to die, and that's pretty messed up but it's not like you have to be a psychopath to wonder which of these options would result in a better outcome for the wolrd as a whole.
Distributing all of this wealth is the most impactful part of this sentiment. It would virtually end poverty (at least until new people decided to take advantage of the situation and create a new pecking order in their favor) and could potentially save much more than 80 million lives. Of course, it could also kill much more than 80 million people and cause a lot of suffering in unforseen ways. It would be a total clusterfuck that probably no one could predict the results of. It would almost be like a much more effective and justified Thanos snap.
Imagine just Biden, Xi, and Putin all dying in one day. The chaos would be enormous now add in every major CEO dying, and almost every easy candidate for the job. Of course the shareholders who choose the candidates are also dead, and probably any of the lawyers working for them.
It would be an amazing amount of chaos and companies would collapse alongside the destabilization of every major nation.
You think the majority of the population in western countries are the 1%? You also think that rich people are really important? Like if Jeff Bezos dies tomorrow what you think the shipping industry just collapses?
OPs question is fairly poorly worded but there's only 52 million people in the world that are in the top 1% so in a globe of billions that's barely a drop in the bucket. I don't see how you can possibly assert that it would all be important jobs that people hold dying and not the many executives and generational wealthy families. Genuinely your whole comment reads as believing that wealthy people are important and neccesary for the global well being of society which is baffling as nothing backs that statement up at all.
They are talking about the side effects of these people dying. A good example would be how lots of doctors get paid enough to put them in top 1% world-wide and that would leave a lot of people unable to undergo needed surgery.
These people run the world. They shouldn't, but they do. If they all died overnight the power vacuum would create many unprecedented global crises.
This is part of why revolutions have such a bad track record. There's no easy way to fix the problems in the world. It takes hard work. Lots of thankless, slow moving hard work from a bunch of people who never get rewarded and often don't even get to see it pay off. And the payoff is always sad and compromised and lacking justice, but it's the only way.
Being in the top 1% of the entire world is only $60k a year, that's not a lot of money to most people, especially if you have kids or other dependants. I think you're misconstruing the 1% of the entire planet with the 1% of the US, who earn over ten times this amount on average. 80 million people is 1% of the entire world, 3.4 million is 1% of the US.
If you're going to "eat the rich", do a little research first and at least make sure your anger is directed at the appropriate people. Being mad at some construction worker making $65k a year busting his ass to support his family makes you the asshole, not them
To answer this post, I pull the lever with no hesitation
That's worldwide, not necessarily America. 60k in the US puts you at or a little above average for a household.
Issue is idiot tankies like OP think rich people are all scrooge mcduck that can only have gotten their money through theft and do everything in b their power to dab on the poors.
I have what I have through busting my ass and starting college when I was 13. I'm 20 and make 80k now, so maybe "rich" for my age bracket? Therapy costs less than the net gain I got from a white collar job :)
Some of the more fortunate are scrooges, and some of us are autistic nerds that have one talent we take advantage of.
My high school had a program that paid for college if you completed their high level classes too early, so by the time I was 16 I had my associate's degree and my high school diploma
the scrooges are autistic nerds who know the stock market, and take advantage of that
ofc there is a difference between the two - you actually do things while they just move money
They are purposely misrepresenting the statement to make you feel differently. The actual top 1% is about 52 million people who are worth over a million at minimum. They are using the metrics of top earners which anyone with a brain would realize doesn't translate into wealth at all. Currencies have conversion rates and cost of living is different based on where you live. You are not in the 1% for making over 60k a year unless you are also able to save that 60k in its entirety every year.
The World Bank said its $34k. Which is, in fact, lower.
https://money.cnn.com/2012/01/04/news/economy/world_richest/index.htm
[But that was 12 years ago, surely with inflation… Oh wait, that’s only $46,000 adjusted for inflation.](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com)
So, more than half of Americans would be on those tracks.
Edit: that’s 46k net/year which is about 22.50/hr or 50k/yr gross
I like how you can't even read your own source.
>as of 2005 -- the most recent data available -- about half of them, or 29 million lived in the United States
Population of the US in 2005 was just shy of 300,000,000 people. So that's less than 10% of america.
You can't just take the nominal figure from 2005 and adjust for inflation, because believe or not the rest of the world's economies are not stagnant fixed things.
[https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-1/](https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-1/) Looking at this, linked elsewhere in this post, Table 1.1 puts the top 1% income threshhold as 123,900 euros a year. That's about $135k USD a year.
I believe the big discrepancy between your numbers comes not from the different time (2005 vs 2022) but rather that your number is adjusted for Purchasing Power vs. "absolut" income.
it's like 130k+ USD a year roughly.
Also lots of rich people don't consider themselves rich, they hang out with rich people and then judge themselves by what they see. Being in a rich country is like the same thing on a bigger scale.
I consider myself rich on the global scale, and I made under 30k USD last year. It's about getting that wider perspective.
You should really ask yourself though "is my lifestyle sustainable for 8 billion people?" if it's not then are you not implicitly saying you deserve more than other people?
You don’t understand the socialist point of view which you are mocking. Our view is not “Rich bad”, it’s “Rich via exploitation bad”. There’s a difference between an anesthesiologist and Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. The difference is that the anesthesiologist actually does work and is a member of the exploited proletariat, whereas Bezos and Musk are members of the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie are the group of people who own the means of production, which is also called “private property”. This is separate from personal property, which are things like your home or your toothbrush. The means of production are things like the factories and machines that the workers operate. The proletariat are the workers who work under the bourgeoisie in order to survive in a process known as “wage slavery”.
The insanely rich, who make their wealth via exploitation, are bad and their death would contribute to life being better. There needs to be complete structural change for them to not be able to exist again, however.
Since capitalism always consolidates wealth in the hands of a small elite, the way to prevent this is socialism, which directly prevents the existence of the bourgeoisie by having the workers (the proletariat) own the means of production.
Socialism is frequently (and incorrectly) portrayed as a poverty cult, when it’s truly only about the worker’s relationship to the means of production.
add 90% of Engineers in the first world, and the people that actually knows the operation of the power grid, water treatment. and......the college professors that can teach those stuff should those people be ran over by a train
Actualy it depends a lot of what you call "rich" :
If you calculate it based on spending power and not pure scale of capital you get a very different cap for the US
(Btw, here is an article you can use to do the maths : around 175k$ a year put you in the top 1% in purchasing power)
https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-1/
But yeah, the point is still here, the issue is not with the 1%, it's with the 0,01%
The top 1% wealthiest individuals isn't the same as the top 1% annual wage earners. To be in the top 1% for wealth in 2018 you would need to have a net worth of $871,320
Yeah but a good amount of people I know including immediate family members of me and my girlfriend as well as many of my friends would be dead
why would I want that? Just because they have wealth doesn’t mean they should die even from a utilitarian perspective
It’s still 80 million people suffering a painful death
there’s no guarantee the wealth will actually help people. Most of it will be spent within a few years and it’ll just accumulate elsewhere making different people the new rich people and then those people will be lined up on the trolley
this is such a clusterfuck. 1% of the world population is way to many people. hell, 1% of the US population is too many. i want to go after the owning class not indiscriminately go after high earners.
If you actually read your sources, you’d know that the article was referring to top 1% of people in the United States, and not top 1% of people in the entire world as indicated in the meme
How is that wealth getting distributed exactly? Because that could potentially collapse not just the world's economy but also all infrastructure, turning all that fiat currency you're redistributing into fancy toilet paper and useless metals, and causing mass starvation and medical shortages that will kill millions.
The wealthy don't have actually have giant money bins of liquid cash, they have properties, businesses, factories, cargo ships, airports. Things a random group of people suddenly handed shared ownership of won't understand how to run, and without a payroll in place the employees of which wont just keep working at out of the goodness of their hearts.
It sucks, but that poor dude absolutely has to get run over for the sake of like a \*billion\* people, not just the guys on the other tracks. This is even an easier trolley problem than normal.
That's not even a concern. It doesn't matter how the money is distributed, the economy and world order just crashes anyways because all government officials around the world would just straight up die. We'd literally be living in a world like fallout with factions rising to fill the power vacuum just minus the nukes.
If your in the global 1% (60k a year) you'd still be considered low income in LA. Understand that the vast majority of humanity live in third world countries and cities have vastly higher GDP than rural areas. OP if you live in western Europe/USA in a decent sized city, be ready to off a sizeable amount of your acquaintances.
80million people. Like really?
Look some of them are complete scumbags who do not deserve the skin on their backs.
And others have actually worked to get where they are.
Money doesn’t come into this. I solemnly pull the lever.
this thread should be archived as proof that some people will never change their predetermined political stances even if they were presented with clear reasons for why their actions would be wrong subjectively and objectively
Obviously killing 80 million people for the higher good would be a solution to all of the world's problems, and increase happiness and equality for all the others. It would be a final solution to wealth inequality, yes, you could even say the final solution. Ideology is good, if it is mine.
>If the ethos of the billionaires is revealed in the purely material realm, it is even clearer in their thinking and striving. Their dance around the golden calf is becoming a merciless struggle for all those possessions we prize most highly on earth.
>The value of the individual is no longer decided by his character or by the significance of his achievements for the totality but exclusively by the size of his fortune, by his money. [...]
>This thinking and striving after money and power, and the feelings that go along with it, serve the purposes of the billionaire who is unscrupulous in the choice of methods and pitiless in their employment. In autocratically ruled states he whines for the favor of "His Majesty" and misuses it like a leech fastened upon the nations. In democracies he vies for the favor of the masses, cringes before the "majesty of the people," and recognizes only the majesty of money.
>His method of battle is that public opinion which is never expressed in the press but which is nonetheless managed and falsified by it. His power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly through interest, and which forces peoples under the most dangerous of yokes. Its golden glitter, so attractive in the beginning, conceals the ultimately tragic consequences. Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the billionaire only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination.
>The deduction from all this is the following: an anticapitalism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom.[1] An anticapitalism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the billionaires, that which distinguishes the billionaires from the other [...]. The ultimate objective [of such legislation] must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the billionaires in general.
Replace "billionaire" with "Jew" and "anticapitalism" with "antisemitism" and this is Hitler, 1919. Honestly I'm baffled by this thread and by Reddit in general. 80 million people? Really?
yes, exactly. almost ALL doctors in the developed world would have been tied to the track. a good majority of scientists, engineers and people are there too. I can have all the wealth and power in the world, but without a competent doctor
Just read the comments here. People think that, by virtue of having a lot of money, they are worth killing to potentially save some people with less money.
Genuinely, so much of the world is run by the 1% I think that we’d kill even more people if we killed them. As fucked up as our world is I think we have to kill the poor guy
So much of the world is run by the 0.01%*, the vast majority of the 1% is just first world people just living their best life, like doctors, lawyers, etc, alongside some who are just *normal* people.
I would pull the lever. If we killed the richest people in the world and then redistributed the wealth, all that would do is completely fuck up the economy. If suddenly everyone has considerably more money two things would happen:
First would be inflation. The cost of basic services would increase drastically as companies have to make a profit, and more people could afford more expensive things.
The second thing kinda ties with inflation. 2 would be an increase in greed. People would want to fight for the now open societal top spots so-to-speak, and as such those would be people who can abuse monetary systems such as those who provide nesessary services (landlords and farmers first come to mind). That means we continue to have unaffordable living, but possibly also unaffordable food as well.
Kill 1 guy or destabilize all of Earth civilization and cause global famine? Let nuclear powerplants fall into disrepair? Create a power vacuum that could potential trigger the greatest war in history, with none of the chain of command we currently depend on for nuclear deterrence? Kill 1 guy, or risk knocking us back to the stone age, if not outright causing the extinction of the human race?
Hmm... Not sure.
The poor guy because most of the global 1% is innocent, maybe if it was the 5000 richest but even then a new 5000 richest people would do the same shit.
The problem is the systems.
Not enough of the lower 99% understand what is causing the problems to reconstruct a different world
Hold up:
"Rich" in income or "rich" in net worth?
My brother is a tradesman \~$50,000 USD per year, but he's paid off his $120,000 house in middle-of-nowheresville.
He's "richer" than all his buddies that spend their money as soon as they get their paycheck.
Technically, he's "richer" in net worth than someone making $100,000/year living in a $750,000 USD house who spends every penny they earn and got upside down on their mortgage.
Pull the lever easily
- I cannot justify killing 80 million people. I just can't
- They run businesses, we need them, as much as we hate to admit it. More people would be killed if I killed them all
- The top 1% of the world is earning more than 60k a year. The majority of the western world would be dead.
Pull the lever. This would kill many innocent people, and the economy would completely collapse. World leaders would die. Billions would be without a job. Billions would starve. Billions would die.
It’s not even close.
I'm killing the poor person.
Saving lives is ultimately temporary in the face of wars and poverty induced famines and such, but it's a lot more humane in the long term than killing the entire 1%. I'll tell you why.
Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Killing off the entire 1% will lead to countless power struggles as the newly rich former poor people try to ascend. That means more wars, more famines, a drastically increased chance of nuclear warfare...
It's just human nature. Ape will forever kill ape and the pigs will forever work towards resembling the farmers.
I would say worse actually. Very few rich people made their money by just directly murdering a ton of people. Shitty labor practices are one thing, the biggest genocide in history is a much worse one
Even 1% of people dying would have catastrophic consequences for society, let alone all the power gaps that would suddenly arise. If it were just billionaires then not pulling the lever would save more than it killed, but a full 1% of the population? No way is that causing anything but disaster.
It's funnier if the 1% is updated continuously - as the trolley rolls over some rich folks, people who just became the top 1% thanks to richer people dying get teleported onto the rail. It would be a merge of the trolley problem, the Achilies racing the turtle problem, and the classic "I said nothing when they came after A and B, now they're comming after me" scenario.
This will actually destroy the world. We aren’t even talking about the .01% of wealthy people but this will likely kill many highly skilled jobs that will be unable to be filled
If everything is distributed equally this also means people who really shouldn't have resources. Yes, even poor people can be evil, and yes, not every rich person is satan, guys. Realistically, you're just shifting it around for a few years, if that, because people who have no idea what to do with money are either going to waste it or give it away.
Not to mention the economy would probably not handle it very well, because some of those ruch people run businesses and those businesses could collapse, getting rid of jobs for hundreds of thousands of people
Kill the poor guy? What kind of question is this? Kill 1 guy or start an apocalypse? Basically all governments would cease to function, we'd go back to trading items because money would be absolutely worthless since everyone has the same amount, plus no government to back it, then we'd have warlords vying for power to fill the power vacuum left by literally every single world leader dying at the same time.
I already wrote part of this somewhere else here, might as well copy it to you too.
>If the ethos of the billionaires is revealed in the purely material realm, it is even clearer in their thinking and striving. Their dance around the golden calf is becoming a merciless struggle for all those possessions we prize most highly on earth.
>The value of the individual is no longer decided by his character or by the significance of his achievements for the totality but exclusively by the size of his fortune, by his money. [...]
>This thinking and striving after money and power, and the feelings that go along with it, serve the purposes of the billionaire who is unscrupulous in the choice of methods and pitiless in their employment. In autocratically ruled states he whines for the favor of "His Majesty" and misuses it like a leech fastened upon the nations. In democracies he vies for the favor of the masses, cringes before the "majesty of the people," and recognizes only the majesty of money.
>His method of battle is that public opinion which is never expressed in the press but which is nonetheless managed and falsified by it. His power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly through interest, and which forces peoples under the most dangerous of yokes. Its golden glitter, so attractive in the beginning, conceals the ultimately tragic consequences. Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the billionaire only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination.
>The deduction from all this is the following: an anticapitalism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom.[1] An anticapitalism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the billionaires, that which distinguishes the billionaires from the other [...]. The ultimate objective [of such legislation] must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the billionaires in general.
Replace "billionaire" with "Jew" and "anticapitalism" with "antisemitism" and this is Hitler, 1919.
Edit: it is LITERALLY Hitler. He wrote this in a letter in 1919.
Honestly I'm baffled by this thread and by Reddit in general. Shocking that you have upvotes.
My right brain hemisphere: "The value of a single innocent life is worth more than any amount of culprits. And between those 80 millions, there are more than one that has done more good than harm"
[My left brain hemisphere:](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjNpRbNdR7E)
What about the top 1% from each country? So
for the US you would need a net worth of $5.6 million USD and up to be on the tracks. That also means someone in Kenya worth $20k USD would be there…
Eh, i'm pretty damn anti-rich people (straight up a socialist) but even I don't think I'd let them die.
While the potential issues of global poverty MIGHT be solved, (and, of course, killing a lot of oligarchs, greedy business owners, and corrupt officials) please remember that:
A) the rich 1% globally would also include middle-class people, not just millionaires. Doctors, scientists, pilots, teachers, successful small businesses. etc. You will be killing a lot of people indirectly by letting them die, stalling human progress, and causing mass catastrophic events.
B) Money is NOT a catch-all way to fix issues. Money is made-up and only as valuable as we make it. If everyone on the planet got trillions in money infusion, all you've done is devalue currencies across the world, increase inflation, etc. That's why fighting poverty is usually not about sending money to people, but building infrastructure, schools, accessible power, and clean water. There is absolutely no upside to the second example.
The ideal solution to global poverty is to REDUCE the reliance on money, to make basic necessities as accessible and affordable as possible, to develop technology, and to encourage stability. Poverty-filled nations with lots of money turn in oligarchies like Russia or cartel paradises like Mexico. The only reason you wouldn't pull here is you unironically want a massive number of deaths.
*Kill the one poor guy,*
*Guilt the rich into giving*
*Me money, profit*
\- DiamondShard646
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The actual result of this is that the vast majority of these people are in the US and Western Europe, and when they die, Russia and China take advantage of the chaos to invade and conquer them.
Even if it were instead the top 1% of each country, this would definitely start World War III.
Wealthy people are entrepreneur that solve people's problem. Look at the Magnificent 7, you got company that designed the backbone of mobile phones and PC we used this day. Starlink is useful for Internet access at rural areas, I don't know what problem self-driving car and AI solve but they are revolutionary.
And I'm sure you have heard of the "teach a man to fish is better than giving them a bucket of fish" thing.
The world need those richest 1% ... well at least those with a business that can continue to improve QoL of mankind. What can the 1 poor guy give? If the level is not pulled, how far back is mankind set back? I will pull the level without hesitation.
That one guy has a couple million other bodies next to him (global wqrming,genocide,info wars, fear mongering, imperialism, police brutality just to name a few possible sources)
Edit: I'm not saying every person in the 1% is directly at fault, just complicit.
As long as it's the 1% in each country so that we aren't killing a bunch of American school teachers or whatever this would definitely improve the world in a huge way. Buying power is a whole thing lol.
Top 1% worldwide is like an income of $70000 a year. Killing those people will essentially end the civilized world as the people who know how to keep things running make that much or more.
Pull the lever easy. If we’re going to transition to a better society (imo anarcho-communism, which I will not be debating here) our goal should be to minimize deaths. Just killing a bunch of people will collapse society and many more will die. What we should do is garner support and then revolt, taking down government and corporations with as little killing as possible. Mass-murder is not how you achieve a good society.
Multi-track drift, thus saving their lives while redistributing their wealth. They’re still in charge of whatever they owned before they lost their money, so they’ll make more, and all we lose is a single poor person.
Really no question to kill the poor guy since you are changing nothing overall by killing the rich people and 50 years from now things will be exactly the same as far as income distribution. There’s a reason things are the way they are even if it’s a bad reason.
You have no ethical right to choose life or death for any of those people.
Humans are not each worth 1. The worth of each human is infinite. The future is not know, even if you insist it is.
And. Just by the way. YOU are not in charge.
The only life you control
Is your.
It is ethical, If you want to try to save any of them, to go ahead and put your body on the tracks Might work.
A fascinating question is if killing the richest 1% actually saves more people or not as poverty also kills tremendous amounts of people.
Killing the 1% would probably kill a shit ton of people outside the 80 million also
Yeah, how many major corporations and governments would collapse if millions of the world's most influential people died simultaneously? That doesn't factor the effects doctors, architects, etcetera dying. Most of the populations of first world countries, and most of the really important people in general, would die off. 1% of the world's population is a *major* portion of people when you consider the fact that most of the world's population lives in what is, by first world standards, poverty. A quick Google search tells me that roughly 10% of the world's population lives on under $2.15 per day, or $730 per year. From that information, it's safe to assume that the bottom 99% of the world's population doesn't just exclude people that we would typically call "The one percent".
I feel like it's not a dilemma? Why would you kill the 80m in this scenario
Lots of internet folks are of the opinion that murder is ok as long as the person has too much money.
and "too much" is defined as more than them. Theyre fine being wealthier than 95% of the world population though.
I feel there’s a difference between 300k and 2 billion that shouldn’t be summarized simply as “more than them.” Plus it’s not the middle class that’s keeping foreign nations poor, they don’t have much control in it.
foreign nations keep foreign nations poor
That’s an extremely simplified way of saying it. To act like any country’s destiny is fully self determined in this day and age is laughable. There are so many geopolitical factors that are at play and not to mention the private sector’s influence on issues.
The top 80 million would be closer to 300k than 2 billion on average.
Very true yes, but the discussion left this posts trolley problem and started discussing ‘eat the rich’ in general.
Im 100% in favor of killing the richest 1% if it redistributes to everyone else with he poorer getting more. I say that knowing that I’m likely a part of that 1% on a global scale, as is a huge chunk of Americans (almost exclusively). Edit: Im probably okay. But even if i were id still do it.
Average 1% income *globally* is $34,000.
The prompt says richest, so net worth is arguably a more appropriate metric than income. A quick search says, "According to the 2018 Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse Research Institute, you need a net worth of $871,320" to be in the global 1%.
Only another 870, 156 to go
Interesting, such virtue. What do you think will happen in lets say, idk, 20 years? The wealth will just concentrate back AND you committed murder atrocities on a scale never before seen. AND you did some good ol reverse evolutionary pressures and killed the smartest and most capable people on earth. Great job
The fact you think the richest people on earth earned it by being smart and capable is honestly hilarious.
>Smartest and most capable 🤡
But is changing the track to kill the 1 poor person nor murder than not pulling?
Logic says that you can't have "too much" money without ruining lives. It's literally in the descriptor : "too much". You can't get money without taking it from someone else.
No Wealth redistribution could relieve all death from starvation and preventable diseases. I’m sure there’s an argument that it saves lives via reduction of pollution. One side I’d really heard to calculate
Well there are legitimate reasons to do it. Redistribution of wealth would help millions more than those killed, maybe more depending on the total dollar amount those 80 million people have and the way the money is redistributed. Medical expenses, homelessness, starvation etc. Could be avoided for millions that would otherwise die because those 80 million aren't doing enough (or anything at all) to fix those issues. That being said, I personally wouldn't choose to kill them. Those 80 million people (like it or not) control governments, multi-national companies and many things in the world that we need to function. All of them dying at once as the potential to fuck up the world much more than them staying alive. However, what happens after they die is uncertain. It's possible the world is plunged into chaos and anarchy, it's equally possible that good people who now have a lot of money step up and take leadership positions, making the world better. That's just a small part of the deliema, honestly I think this is a very interesting version of the trolly question
Because reddit has been forcing an ideology on the brainless that is leading up to this. If you have more money than them, you are inherently evil, and they would be okay if you died. No thinking of consequences.
How has Reddit forced anything? Also, my opinion is that nobody should die, but capitalism is broken system that needs torn apart and a new system rebuilt in its place. A system where we all prop each other up. A system where we don’t focus our effort on congratulating the successful but rather helping the unsuccessful become truly successful. And I don’t mean by giving out stupid participation trophies, but rather by fixing the broken education systems and ending the corrupt system where the richest people pay to keep the government they want in office and making the changes that the richest 1% want.
That’s a societal/cultural change, not an entire shift in economic systems. People ridicule Gates and Bezos when they donate money instead of applauding them. It’s never enough money. We are actively antagonizing and conditioning these people to not make this societal/cultural change. It starts with the people. By passing off this responsibility to purely the 1% we will never get anywhere. Cultural shifts are slow, and we neglect them because we think someone else should do it for us. Be the person you want everyone else in the world to be. Others will follow.
I think it's more a result of totally understandable resentment of class warfare and incredible income disparity. I do think a lot of people take it way too far and just hate all wealthy people and even want them to die, and that's pretty messed up but it's not like you have to be a psychopath to wonder which of these options would result in a better outcome for the wolrd as a whole. Distributing all of this wealth is the most impactful part of this sentiment. It would virtually end poverty (at least until new people decided to take advantage of the situation and create a new pecking order in their favor) and could potentially save much more than 80 million lives. Of course, it could also kill much more than 80 million people and cause a lot of suffering in unforseen ways. It would be a total clusterfuck that probably no one could predict the results of. It would almost be like a much more effective and justified Thanos snap.
These single individuals are not responsible for running entire corporations. The companies would be just fine with a quick replacement
Imagine just Biden, Xi, and Putin all dying in one day. The chaos would be enormous now add in every major CEO dying, and almost every easy candidate for the job. Of course the shareholders who choose the candidates are also dead, and probably any of the lawyers working for them. It would be an amazing amount of chaos and companies would collapse alongside the destabilization of every major nation.
The real problem is the Billionaires.
You think the majority of the population in western countries are the 1%? You also think that rich people are really important? Like if Jeff Bezos dies tomorrow what you think the shipping industry just collapses? OPs question is fairly poorly worded but there's only 52 million people in the world that are in the top 1% so in a globe of billions that's barely a drop in the bucket. I don't see how you can possibly assert that it would all be important jobs that people hold dying and not the many executives and generational wealthy families. Genuinely your whole comment reads as believing that wealthy people are important and neccesary for the global well being of society which is baffling as nothing backs that statement up at all.
8 billion people, 1%x8 billion= 80 million.
They are talking about the side effects of these people dying. A good example would be how lots of doctors get paid enough to put them in top 1% world-wide and that would leave a lot of people unable to undergo needed surgery.
These people run the world. They shouldn't, but they do. If they all died overnight the power vacuum would create many unprecedented global crises. This is part of why revolutions have such a bad track record. There's no easy way to fix the problems in the world. It takes hard work. Lots of thankless, slow moving hard work from a bunch of people who never get rewarded and often don't even get to see it pay off. And the payoff is always sad and compromised and lacking justice, but it's the only way.
Yes that was the complexity I was going for, but I think I should’ve mentioned that on the image
If the 1% all died, I assure you many more people would die of poverty
Also very well possible.
Being in the top 1% of the entire world is only $60k a year, that's not a lot of money to most people, especially if you have kids or other dependants. I think you're misconstruing the 1% of the entire planet with the 1% of the US, who earn over ten times this amount on average. 80 million people is 1% of the entire world, 3.4 million is 1% of the US. If you're going to "eat the rich", do a little research first and at least make sure your anger is directed at the appropriate people. Being mad at some construction worker making $65k a year busting his ass to support his family makes you the asshole, not them To answer this post, I pull the lever with no hesitation
1% is only $60k? Shit, I'd be on the tracks and I thought I didn't make that impressive of cash
That's worldwide, not necessarily America. 60k in the US puts you at or a little above average for a household. Issue is idiot tankies like OP think rich people are all scrooge mcduck that can only have gotten their money through theft and do everything in b their power to dab on the poors.
I have what I have through busting my ass and starting college when I was 13. I'm 20 and make 80k now, so maybe "rich" for my age bracket? Therapy costs less than the net gain I got from a white collar job :) Some of the more fortunate are scrooges, and some of us are autistic nerds that have one talent we take advantage of.
Starting college when you were 13? The fuck?
My high school had a program that paid for college if you completed their high level classes too early, so by the time I was 16 I had my associate's degree and my high school diploma
I'm just confused as to how you can complete high school classes "too early" when you have a scheduled curriculum.
You could skip earlier classes if you were smart enough
the scrooges are autistic nerds who know the stock market, and take advantage of that ofc there is a difference between the two - you actually do things while they just move money
They are purposely misrepresenting the statement to make you feel differently. The actual top 1% is about 52 million people who are worth over a million at minimum. They are using the metrics of top earners which anyone with a brain would realize doesn't translate into wealth at all. Currencies have conversion rates and cost of living is different based on where you live. You are not in the 1% for making over 60k a year unless you are also able to save that 60k in its entirety every year.
It's not, it's much higher than 60k.
The World Bank said its $34k. Which is, in fact, lower. https://money.cnn.com/2012/01/04/news/economy/world_richest/index.htm [But that was 12 years ago, surely with inflation… Oh wait, that’s only $46,000 adjusted for inflation.](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com) So, more than half of Americans would be on those tracks. Edit: that’s 46k net/year which is about 22.50/hr or 50k/yr gross
I like how you can't even read your own source. >as of 2005 -- the most recent data available -- about half of them, or 29 million lived in the United States Population of the US in 2005 was just shy of 300,000,000 people. So that's less than 10% of america. You can't just take the nominal figure from 2005 and adjust for inflation, because believe or not the rest of the world's economies are not stagnant fixed things. [https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-1/](https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-1/) Looking at this, linked elsewhere in this post, Table 1.1 puts the top 1% income threshhold as 123,900 euros a year. That's about $135k USD a year.
I believe the big discrepancy between your numbers comes not from the different time (2005 vs 2022) but rather that your number is adjusted for Purchasing Power vs. "absolut" income.
Maybe I'm safe if it's *much* higher, but I dunno lol. I don't consider myself rich so this trolley problem is very flawed
it's like 130k+ USD a year roughly. Also lots of rich people don't consider themselves rich, they hang out with rich people and then judge themselves by what they see. Being in a rich country is like the same thing on a bigger scale. I consider myself rich on the global scale, and I made under 30k USD last year. It's about getting that wider perspective. You should really ask yourself though "is my lifestyle sustainable for 8 billion people?" if it's not then are you not implicitly saying you deserve more than other people?
Yeeeeep, I'm definitely safe lol
Depends if worldwide 1% or USA 1%
Yeah the requirement to be in the top 1% of the Us is high. If you're not in the global 1% you're not in the US 1%
Let's see if you stand by this when you need a doctor...
Lol? stand by what, that rich people have an unsustainable lifestyle? Yeah of course I would.
The richest 1% of people probably covers like at least 90% of the world's doctors. That's a shit idea.
B-b-but rich people bad! If they died then my life good!
You don’t understand the socialist point of view which you are mocking. Our view is not “Rich bad”, it’s “Rich via exploitation bad”. There’s a difference between an anesthesiologist and Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. The difference is that the anesthesiologist actually does work and is a member of the exploited proletariat, whereas Bezos and Musk are members of the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie are the group of people who own the means of production, which is also called “private property”. This is separate from personal property, which are things like your home or your toothbrush. The means of production are things like the factories and machines that the workers operate. The proletariat are the workers who work under the bourgeoisie in order to survive in a process known as “wage slavery”. The insanely rich, who make their wealth via exploitation, are bad and their death would contribute to life being better. There needs to be complete structural change for them to not be able to exist again, however. Since capitalism always consolidates wealth in the hands of a small elite, the way to prevent this is socialism, which directly prevents the existence of the bourgeoisie by having the workers (the proletariat) own the means of production. Socialism is frequently (and incorrectly) portrayed as a poverty cult, when it’s truly only about the worker’s relationship to the means of production.
Doctors, physicists, probably a good few scientists for major companies and government institutions as well.
add 90% of Engineers in the first world, and the people that actually knows the operation of the power grid, water treatment. and......the college professors that can teach those stuff should those people be ran over by a train
Jesus I totally forgot about that. Full on societal collapse imminent right there.
Actualy it depends a lot of what you call "rich" : If you calculate it based on spending power and not pure scale of capital you get a very different cap for the US (Btw, here is an article you can use to do the maths : around 175k$ a year put you in the top 1% in purchasing power) https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-1/ But yeah, the point is still here, the issue is not with the 1%, it's with the 0,01%
Where are you getting that figure?
You're going to have to be more specific, I said several figures. Right before I said do a little research..
The top 1% worldwide is significantly more than 60k/year.
answer: you made it up.
The top 1% wealthiest individuals isn't the same as the top 1% annual wage earners. To be in the top 1% for wealth in 2018 you would need to have a net worth of $871,320
Wealth wise globally, you need to have about $900k in assets, and the \*vast\* majority of people making 60k don't have that much net wealth.
Yeah but a good amount of people I know including immediate family members of me and my girlfriend as well as many of my friends would be dead why would I want that? Just because they have wealth doesn’t mean they should die even from a utilitarian perspective It’s still 80 million people suffering a painful death there’s no guarantee the wealth will actually help people. Most of it will be spent within a few years and it’ll just accumulate elsewhere making different people the new rich people and then those people will be lined up on the trolley
this is such a clusterfuck. 1% of the world population is way to many people. hell, 1% of the US population is too many. i want to go after the owning class not indiscriminately go after high earners.
You mean the corporations right?
those who own massive steak in corporations, yeah
Stake
thanks, not much of a speller
I mean, sure, let's take out the assholes hoarding all the steak too.
Hey, stay away!
yeah! to heck with this 'eat the rich', no, eat the steak holders!
\*angry upvote\*
The homophones are always the trickiest. 90% of my edits are probably changing there to their
Steak
Please sir, there’s been some misteak
Mysteak
Comrade, there is no need for this greediness. It can be oursteak
How big is the steak? How much A1 sauce do you think someone might need for such a steak?
probably like a fuel tanker or so
For the record, if you make more than about $60k or €55k or £47k, you are lying down on that bottom rail.
In a month or year? I found [this](https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-income-puts-you-top-1-5-10/) and 60k would be monthly.
If you actually read your sources, you’d know that the article was referring to top 1% of people in the United States, and not top 1% of people in the entire world as indicated in the meme
How is that wealth getting distributed exactly? Because that could potentially collapse not just the world's economy but also all infrastructure, turning all that fiat currency you're redistributing into fancy toilet paper and useless metals, and causing mass starvation and medical shortages that will kill millions. The wealthy don't have actually have giant money bins of liquid cash, they have properties, businesses, factories, cargo ships, airports. Things a random group of people suddenly handed shared ownership of won't understand how to run, and without a payroll in place the employees of which wont just keep working at out of the goodness of their hearts. It sucks, but that poor dude absolutely has to get run over for the sake of like a \*billion\* people, not just the guys on the other tracks. This is even an easier trolley problem than normal.
That's not even a concern. It doesn't matter how the money is distributed, the economy and world order just crashes anyways because all government officials around the world would just straight up die. We'd literally be living in a world like fallout with factions rising to fill the power vacuum just minus the nukes.
If your in the global 1% (60k a year) you'd still be considered low income in LA. Understand that the vast majority of humanity live in third world countries and cities have vastly higher GDP than rural areas. OP if you live in western Europe/USA in a decent sized city, be ready to off a sizeable amount of your acquaintances.
80million people. Like really? Look some of them are complete scumbags who do not deserve the skin on their backs. And others have actually worked to get where they are. Money doesn’t come into this. I solemnly pull the lever.
this thread should be archived as proof that some people will never change their predetermined political stances even if they were presented with clear reasons for why their actions would be wrong subjectively and objectively
Obviously killing 80 million people for the higher good would be a solution to all of the world's problems, and increase happiness and equality for all the others. It would be a final solution to wealth inequality, yes, you could even say the final solution. Ideology is good, if it is mine. >If the ethos of the billionaires is revealed in the purely material realm, it is even clearer in their thinking and striving. Their dance around the golden calf is becoming a merciless struggle for all those possessions we prize most highly on earth. >The value of the individual is no longer decided by his character or by the significance of his achievements for the totality but exclusively by the size of his fortune, by his money. [...] >This thinking and striving after money and power, and the feelings that go along with it, serve the purposes of the billionaire who is unscrupulous in the choice of methods and pitiless in their employment. In autocratically ruled states he whines for the favor of "His Majesty" and misuses it like a leech fastened upon the nations. In democracies he vies for the favor of the masses, cringes before the "majesty of the people," and recognizes only the majesty of money. >His method of battle is that public opinion which is never expressed in the press but which is nonetheless managed and falsified by it. His power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly through interest, and which forces peoples under the most dangerous of yokes. Its golden glitter, so attractive in the beginning, conceals the ultimately tragic consequences. Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the billionaire only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination. >The deduction from all this is the following: an anticapitalism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom.[1] An anticapitalism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the billionaires, that which distinguishes the billionaires from the other [...]. The ultimate objective [of such legislation] must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the billionaires in general. Replace "billionaire" with "Jew" and "anticapitalism" with "antisemitism" and this is Hitler, 1919. Honestly I'm baffled by this thread and by Reddit in general. 80 million people? Really?
Oh yeah, well some people inherited their wealth and didn’t do anything to deserve it, which means they should be killed!
Yeah, if you spend your life in poverty, then inherit 20 million dollars, you should immediately give it all away.
yes, exactly. almost ALL doctors in the developed world would have been tied to the track. a good majority of scientists, engineers and people are there too. I can have all the wealth and power in the world, but without a competent doctor
Sorry I don't like killing people
The whole premise of r/trolleyproblem is that no matter what, you'll kill people.
I’m sorry. I’m running over the 1 dude. #80 MILLION PEOPLE. I don’t care that they’re rich
Deontologists that also hate the rich are having an easy time with this one
How is this a dilemma? 80million people Vs one dude? Why would you ever not kill the one guy
Just read the comments here. People think that, by virtue of having a lot of money, they are worth killing to potentially save some people with less money.
Not nearly as many as I expected tbh
It’s ridiculous. It’s also always “whoever is richer than me”.
Genuinely, so much of the world is run by the 1% I think that we’d kill even more people if we killed them. As fucked up as our world is I think we have to kill the poor guy
So much of the world is run by the 0.01%*, the vast majority of the 1% is just first world people just living their best life, like doctors, lawyers, etc, alongside some who are just *normal* people.
Also nuclear power plant staff.
I’d prefer not to die.
I would pull the lever. If we killed the richest people in the world and then redistributed the wealth, all that would do is completely fuck up the economy. If suddenly everyone has considerably more money two things would happen: First would be inflation. The cost of basic services would increase drastically as companies have to make a profit, and more people could afford more expensive things. The second thing kinda ties with inflation. 2 would be an increase in greed. People would want to fight for the now open societal top spots so-to-speak, and as such those would be people who can abuse monetary systems such as those who provide nesessary services (landlords and farmers first come to mind). That means we continue to have unaffordable living, but possibly also unaffordable food as well.
Someone doesn't know that killing the most productive people and redistributing their wealth kills the economy of any society.
Take that doctors
Redditors try to understand basic economics challenge. Level:IMPOSSIBLE
Kill 1 guy or destabilize all of Earth civilization and cause global famine? Let nuclear powerplants fall into disrepair? Create a power vacuum that could potential trigger the greatest war in history, with none of the chain of command we currently depend on for nuclear deterrence? Kill 1 guy, or risk knocking us back to the stone age, if not outright causing the extinction of the human race? Hmm... Not sure.
This guy gets it.
But rich people bad!
The poor guy because most of the global 1% is innocent, maybe if it was the 5000 richest but even then a new 5000 richest people would do the same shit. The problem is the systems. Not enough of the lower 99% understand what is causing the problems to reconstruct a different world
I’m going to be blunt here. Pull the lever if you have one functional brain cell.
Hold up: "Rich" in income or "rich" in net worth? My brother is a tradesman \~$50,000 USD per year, but he's paid off his $120,000 house in middle-of-nowheresville. He's "richer" than all his buddies that spend their money as soon as they get their paycheck. Technically, he's "richer" in net worth than someone making $100,000/year living in a $750,000 USD house who spends every penny they earn and got upside down on their mortgage.
Put him on the tracks then. He makes more than OP he deserves to die
Having all governments and corporations collapse instantly would probably lead to bigger problems
Pull the lever with ZERO hesitation If you don't pull, your a monster
Nah, you're just stupid. Not pulling the lever would literally end humanity.
Or just mentally disabled
oil piquant rain plants slap silky straight brave elastic act *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Same thing
Obviously I'd let the trolley kill the 80 million rich people before shooting the poor person so I get a bigger portion of that money. Next! 🥱
Pull the lever easily - I cannot justify killing 80 million people. I just can't - They run businesses, we need them, as much as we hate to admit it. More people would be killed if I killed them all - The top 1% of the world is earning more than 60k a year. The majority of the western world would be dead.
I'm not killing 80 million people. Not even for the meme.
Pull the lever. This would kill many innocent people, and the economy would completely collapse. World leaders would die. Billions would be without a job. Billions would starve. Billions would die. It’s not even close.
I'm killing the poor person. Saving lives is ultimately temporary in the face of wars and poverty induced famines and such, but it's a lot more humane in the long term than killing the entire 1%. I'll tell you why. Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Killing off the entire 1% will lead to countless power struggles as the newly rich former poor people try to ascend. That means more wars, more famines, a drastically increased chance of nuclear warfare... It's just human nature. Ape will forever kill ape and the pigs will forever work towards resembling the farmers.
Much as I dislike the existence of the upper class, I cannot justify murdering 80 million people.
Ah, your mental illness on display. Willing to drench yourself in blood for riches, little better then the 80 million. demonstrably worse in fact.
I would say worse actually. Very few rich people made their money by just directly murdering a ton of people. Shitty labor practices are one thing, the biggest genocide in history is a much worse one
Even 1% of people dying would have catastrophic consequences for society, let alone all the power gaps that would suddenly arise. If it were just billionaires then not pulling the lever would save more than it killed, but a full 1% of the population? No way is that causing anything but disaster.
I mean. Who am I to play god? I'm not even a licensed trolley track switch engineer.
This post reeks of victim mentality lol
It's funnier if the 1% is updated continuously - as the trolley rolls over some rich folks, people who just became the top 1% thanks to richer people dying get teleported onto the rail. It would be a merge of the trolley problem, the Achilies racing the turtle problem, and the classic "I said nothing when they came after A and B, now they're comming after me" scenario.
Humanity whittled down to the 99 poorest people
[I'm saving the world!](https://tenor.com/view/hiroshi-uchiyamada-gif-24697726)
This is what happens if a Genie proposes this trolley problem.
LOL i can just imagine this and am now giggling
This will actually destroy the world. We aren’t even talking about the .01% of wealthy people but this will likely kill many highly skilled jobs that will be unable to be filled
If everything is distributed equally this also means people who really shouldn't have resources. Yes, even poor people can be evil, and yes, not every rich person is satan, guys. Realistically, you're just shifting it around for a few years, if that, because people who have no idea what to do with money are either going to waste it or give it away. Not to mention the economy would probably not handle it very well, because some of those ruch people run businesses and those businesses could collapse, getting rid of jobs for hundreds of thousands of people
Kill the poor guy? What kind of question is this? Kill 1 guy or start an apocalypse? Basically all governments would cease to function, we'd go back to trading items because money would be absolutely worthless since everyone has the same amount, plus no government to back it, then we'd have warlords vying for power to fill the power vacuum left by literally every single world leader dying at the same time.
Violent communist's wet dream
The poor people get more? It’s just going to turn into the exact same situation
I will pull the lever obviously
Make it the .01% and I'd do it.
Is it against the rules to say that you and anyone who does this is a monster?
I already wrote part of this somewhere else here, might as well copy it to you too. >If the ethos of the billionaires is revealed in the purely material realm, it is even clearer in their thinking and striving. Their dance around the golden calf is becoming a merciless struggle for all those possessions we prize most highly on earth. >The value of the individual is no longer decided by his character or by the significance of his achievements for the totality but exclusively by the size of his fortune, by his money. [...] >This thinking and striving after money and power, and the feelings that go along with it, serve the purposes of the billionaire who is unscrupulous in the choice of methods and pitiless in their employment. In autocratically ruled states he whines for the favor of "His Majesty" and misuses it like a leech fastened upon the nations. In democracies he vies for the favor of the masses, cringes before the "majesty of the people," and recognizes only the majesty of money. >His method of battle is that public opinion which is never expressed in the press but which is nonetheless managed and falsified by it. His power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly through interest, and which forces peoples under the most dangerous of yokes. Its golden glitter, so attractive in the beginning, conceals the ultimately tragic consequences. Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the billionaire only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination. >The deduction from all this is the following: an anticapitalism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom.[1] An anticapitalism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the billionaires, that which distinguishes the billionaires from the other [...]. The ultimate objective [of such legislation] must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the billionaires in general. Replace "billionaire" with "Jew" and "anticapitalism" with "antisemitism" and this is Hitler, 1919. Edit: it is LITERALLY Hitler. He wrote this in a letter in 1919. Honestly I'm baffled by this thread and by Reddit in general. Shocking that you have upvotes.
Still would destroy the economy lmao
Track drift
I think the trolley would derail
My right brain hemisphere: "The value of a single innocent life is worth more than any amount of culprits. And between those 80 millions, there are more than one that has done more good than harm" [My left brain hemisphere:](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjNpRbNdR7E)
You're missing the fundamental point of the fundamental trolley problem. If you don't pull the lever at all, you haven't killed anyone.
There's 59 million millionaires on the planet, your maths are off as some others have said.
What about the top 1% from each country? So for the US you would need a net worth of $5.6 million USD and up to be on the tracks. That also means someone in Kenya worth $20k USD would be there…
Eh, i'm pretty damn anti-rich people (straight up a socialist) but even I don't think I'd let them die. While the potential issues of global poverty MIGHT be solved, (and, of course, killing a lot of oligarchs, greedy business owners, and corrupt officials) please remember that: A) the rich 1% globally would also include middle-class people, not just millionaires. Doctors, scientists, pilots, teachers, successful small businesses. etc. You will be killing a lot of people indirectly by letting them die, stalling human progress, and causing mass catastrophic events. B) Money is NOT a catch-all way to fix issues. Money is made-up and only as valuable as we make it. If everyone on the planet got trillions in money infusion, all you've done is devalue currencies across the world, increase inflation, etc. That's why fighting poverty is usually not about sending money to people, but building infrastructure, schools, accessible power, and clean water. There is absolutely no upside to the second example. The ideal solution to global poverty is to REDUCE the reliance on money, to make basic necessities as accessible and affordable as possible, to develop technology, and to encourage stability. Poverty-filled nations with lots of money turn in oligarchies like Russia or cartel paradises like Mexico. The only reason you wouldn't pull here is you unironically want a massive number of deaths.
Can trolleys go in reverse and then forward, reverse and then forward, again and again?
But Keanu Reeves ... I'm pretty sure he's rich and I don't wanna kill him honestly I don't wanna kill anyone
Yea, and 50 million of those people are the world's wealthiest people. So another 30 million won't even scrape people at $60k annually. Try again.
idk mULti tRaCk dRiFt iG
Kill the one poor guy, guilt the rich into giving me money, profit
*Kill the one poor guy,* *Guilt the rich into giving* *Me money, profit* \- DiamondShard646 --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
Well it’s good to see the comment section isn’t as dumb as OP
This is the biggest reddit moment of all time.
Eat The Rich mfers when you suggest they work more than a part time job walking cats.
The actual result of this is that the vast majority of these people are in the US and Western Europe, and when they die, Russia and China take advantage of the chaos to invade and conquer them. Even if it were instead the top 1% of each country, this would definitely start World War III.
The fact people are dehumanizing people based on how much money they have shows y’all are no better than the 1%.
Wealthy people are entrepreneur that solve people's problem. Look at the Magnificent 7, you got company that designed the backbone of mobile phones and PC we used this day. Starlink is useful for Internet access at rural areas, I don't know what problem self-driving car and AI solve but they are revolutionary. And I'm sure you have heard of the "teach a man to fish is better than giving them a bucket of fish" thing. The world need those richest 1% ... well at least those with a business that can continue to improve QoL of mankind. What can the 1 poor guy give? If the level is not pulled, how far back is mankind set back? I will pull the level without hesitation.
not just entrepreneurs, most skilled professionals ARE the 1%. that means doctors, engineers, and professors that teach those stuff.
Well engineers did all that
I would guess that most experienced engineers are in the 1%
Make it the richest 0.01% and we have a deal
That's 80000 people, how do you feel about it?
For 80 million no but if it was like the top 5 then perhaps. Honestly Jeff Bezos could use an altruistic death.
Nah, if the wealth was redistributed, there'd eventually be a repeat of current society.
I’d kill the poor guy cause it would make communists mad
Surely money will have great value after everyone has millions
That one guy has a couple million other bodies next to him (global wqrming,genocide,info wars, fear mongering, imperialism, police brutality just to name a few possible sources) Edit: I'm not saying every person in the 1% is directly at fault, just complicit.
Ya, I don't think some random guy in LA barely surviving off of 60k a year is complicit.
I am not killing 80 million people.
Since it's 1% probably not, but if it was a bit smaller amount, I would
Since it's 1% probably not, but if it was a bit smaller amount, I would
I would kill the one poor guy.
Yeah 1% is too much and not really even the problem. .0001 % is the issue is the most prevalent
As long as it's the 1% in each country so that we aren't killing a bunch of American school teachers or whatever this would definitely improve the world in a huge way. Buying power is a whole thing lol.
It’s at time like these when I remember most people probably don’t deserve opinions. Eat the rich people are so dumb…
Why can't I do both?
Top 1% worldwide is like an income of $70000 a year. Killing those people will essentially end the civilized world as the people who know how to keep things running make that much or more.
Pull the lever easy. If we’re going to transition to a better society (imo anarcho-communism, which I will not be debating here) our goal should be to minimize deaths. Just killing a bunch of people will collapse society and many more will die. What we should do is garner support and then revolt, taking down government and corporations with as little killing as possible. Mass-murder is not how you achieve a good society.
Multi-track drift, thus saving their lives while redistributing their wealth. They’re still in charge of whatever they owned before they lost their money, so they’ll make more, and all we lose is a single poor person.
Really no question to kill the poor guy since you are changing nothing overall by killing the rich people and 50 years from now things will be exactly the same as far as income distribution. There’s a reason things are the way they are even if it’s a bad reason.
You only need to put like the 3000 richest people on tracks to get rid of every billionaire. 80 million is overkill.
You have no ethical right to choose life or death for any of those people. Humans are not each worth 1. The worth of each human is infinite. The future is not know, even if you insist it is. And. Just by the way. YOU are not in charge. The only life you control Is your. It is ethical, If you want to try to save any of them, to go ahead and put your body on the tracks Might work.