No More Billionaires: "After You Reach $999 Million..."

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• Alan: The above meme makes way too much sense.
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• Still, it bears repetition.
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• The long game is the long game.
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  Zach Zimet

  
  

  Do you believe that the general level of wealth increasing in the world, and the dwindling level of people in poverty, is "fake news?"

  
  

  I don't mean this in a dismissive way, I think a reasonable person could have fact-based reasons to dismiss the way such things are measured, or what they really mean.
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• Alan Archibald
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  As with most things, the answer to your question depends on how wealth is calculated, and whether or not we take into account "downstream costs."

  
  

  This may be favorite New Yorker cartoon: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/8eiy40/earth_day/

  
  

  I also think vast wealth is too seductive, and too often destructive.

  
  

  Trump -- and his kids -- are illustrations of where big money often leads.

  
  

  40 years ago I was walking on the Lake Ontario shore with a wealthy woman who -- out of the blue -- said to me: "I've known a lot of millionaires Alan, but I've never known one who wasn't a sonofabitch."

  At the moment, I cannot locate a pertinent quotation but it goes something like this: "The trouble with being rich is that you have to live with other rich people."

  Or maybe it was: "The punishment for being rich is that you have to live with other rich people."

  "The man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest." Thoreau

  When I'm south of the border, the truth of Thoreau's comment is evident.

  Of course, there are always exceptions. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/42336358/george-clooney-gave-his-friends-1-million-each

  Here's an Atlantic article about lottery winners: the promise and the reality.

  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/lottery-winners-research/423543/

  Finally, although the popular imagination tends to admire Midas, the tragic fact is that he could no longer touch the people he loved for they would turn to gold.

  (To answer your question directly: No I do not think the dwindling number of people living in material poverty is fake news. I also suspect that the number of people living in psycho-spiritual poverty is increasing.)