this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
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I kinda went on a little research spree on economics this afternoon but at one point I figured it's probably good to know if it's possible for, say, at least 98% of people on earth to live a happy fulfilled life at all.

I know there's plenty of people who'd be more than happy to have literally nothing more than a house, food and water, but that still leaves a whole lot of people who want other things in life.

Do we have any metrics or data on wether the earth can sustain roughly 8 billion humans?

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[–] Geodad@lemmy.world 92 points 1 month ago (29 children)

Yes, there is. The problem is that the rich hoard resources, like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold. This is a feature of capitalism.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (27 children)

Money is a placeholder for labor. If you distribute all their money, the same labor needs to get done.

It absolutely helps, but it can't make everyone rich because by definition "rich" requires living off the work of others. (I'm using the word rich losely to mean comfortable.) What it can do is raise the bottom 10% out of poverty.

The US consumes at a level unsustainable by the Earth. Bezos's billions doesn't mean he consumes a billion cheeseburgers a day. His personal waste is huge but tiny when compared the the total of 350m Americans.

[–] Geodad@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Billionaires don't earn their money though. It's stolen in the form of low wages and denied pay increases.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Not really. Billionaires don't have a checking account with billions of dollars in it that they stole from their workers. The vast majority of their wealth is locked in non-liquid investment vehicles. If they actually tried to cash those in at once, they'd only get a fraction of that wealth.

The big problem is banks will loan them money based on those non-liquid assets and it's not taxed as income.

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 2 points 4 weeks ago

That value could be dispensed fairly to workers. Jeff Bezos essentially gets paid in AMZN stock, and there's no reason that stock could not be dispensed to workers just the same. 10, 100, 1000 shares to each of the 1M employees, every year. The fact that Bezos and his fellow capitalists have kept all of the business value to themselves and not shared it with their workers is how they have hoarded/stolen the value of their employees' labor.

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