The moral paradox of extreme wealth: Why people oppose it yet are reluctant to take steps to reduce it. Really!

Some dim witted, naive psychology college professor wrote this piece! Most likely, she has no clue about a free market economy!

Her lifetime citation count on Google Scholar is 3466! This is very low!

This piece was published by

What a joke!

Caveat: I did not read her piece!

"... Given the prevalence of such stark inequality, it would be easy to assume that most people accept it as fair – but they don’t. As a psychologist who studies how people navigate moral problems, I suspect that one major challenge to effectively reining in extreme wealth is that doing so forces people to navigate between opposing moral demands. ...

Some argue that people chronically underestimate the scale of inequality – in the 2014 study, Americans underestimated the actual pay ratio at the time as being only 30-to-1.

Others argue that the primary driver of the disconnect is people’s unwillingness to abandon their beliefs in merit – that wealth is the product of hard work, talent and risk. ..."

The moral paradox of extreme wealth: Why people oppose it yet are reluctant to take steps to reduce it

The author Jennifer Cole Wright (Source)

This is her portrait photo on Google Scholar

A satellite foundation model for improved wealth monitoring. Really!

When top ML & AI researchers naively think they can improve social outcomes or social improvements! In this case it is Stefano Ermon of Stanford University! Lets' not forget that the brilliant physicist Albert Einstein was a stupid socialist!

This paper is most likely a joke! How easy is it for wealthy individuals to fool this model?

Will this kind of wealth modeling not be abused by greedy governments to tax the rich? The rich will vote with their feet etc. to avoid extra tax burdens.

From the abstract:

"Poverty statistics guide social policy, but in many low- and middle-income countries, censuses and household surveys that collect these data are costly, infrequent, quickly outdated, and sometimes error-prone.

Satellite imagery offers global coverage and the possibility of predicting economic livelihoods at scale, yet existing approaches to predicting livelihoods with imagery or other non-traditional data often fail to reliably identify local-level variation and, as we show, degrade under temporal shift.

Here we introduce Tempov, a satellite foundation model pretrained by self-supervision on three million bi-temporal Landsat pairs and adapted with parameter-efficient fine-tuning to sparse survey labels. The model enables large-scale, high-resolution wealth mapping and dynamic measurement, including zero-shot nowcasting up to a decade after observed labels, retrospective hindcasting, and decadal change tracking, while outperforming existing neural network and geospatial foundation-model baselines.

In low-label regimes, Tempov achieves competitive accuracy with only 10% of survey samples, indicating substantially reduced dependence on expensive label collection.

The model further generalizes across populous countries within and outside Africa, and scales to a unified Africa-wide model with strong continent-level performance (, ), from which we generate high-resolution decadal maps of wealth and wealth changes for the African continent.

Analysis of these maps shows large variation in recent economic performance both within and across countries. Our open-source approach provides a pathway to timely, scalable, low-cost monitoring of wealth and poverty from routinely collected satellite data."

[2604.23166] A satellite foundation model for improved wealth monitoring

Osteuropa auf der Überholspur in der Vermögensbildung der Haushalte in Europa

"... Eine Erhebung der Deutschen Bundesbank zu den Vermögensbeständen europäischer Haushalte zeigt, dass die Deutschen von allen Seiten, insbesondere aus dem Osten, zunehmend auf hintere Plätze verwiesen werden.

Die jüngste Bundesbankerhebung weist Zahlen aus, die etwa ein Jahr alt sind und sich seitdem in Deutschland angesichts von Rezession und anhaltender Inflation eher verschlechtert haben dürften. In den Referenzstaaten hingegen zeigen die Daten weiterhin eine positive Tendenz. Zu Beginn des Jahres 2024 lag der Medianvermögenswert eines typischen deutschen Haushalts bei rund 103.000 Euro. ...

Die Deutschen bilden ihr Vermögen mit einer im internationalen Vergleich niedrigen Quote an Wohneigentum und setzen zudem nur in sehr geringem Maße auf das zwar volatile, aber langfristig sehr dynamische Aktiensparen. Stattdessen wird Kapital vielfach bei Banken geparkt, die es in konservative und in den vergangenen Jahren real verlustreiche Anleiheportfolios und Tagesgeldkonten lenken. Die Folge ist eine gehemmte Kapitalbildung privater Haushalte. 

Diese steht zusätzlich im Kreuzfeuer der Politik. Die Selbstdeklaration der Bundesrepublik als großzügiges globales Sozialamt, maßgeblich geprägt seit der Migrationspolitik Angela Merkels, hat die ohnehin massiven Umverteilungstendenzen dramatisch beschleunigt. Gerade die Leistungsträger der mittleren und unteren Einkommensschichten geraten zunehmend unter Druck. Steigende Sozialabgaben, hohe Steuerlasten und die Erosionsmaschine der grünen Transformation mit explodierenden Energiepreisen wirken direkt vermögensvernichtend. ...

Politischer Realismus im Osten

In Osteuropa hingegen herrscht politischer Realismus. Dieser spiegelt die Grundstimmung in den tonangebenden Staaten Polen und Ungarn wider, die sich auch innerhalb der Visegrád-Gruppe in Brüssel zunehmend Gehör verschaffen. Dort blickt man aus einer woke-linken Globalistenperspektive mit Unverständnis auf die national-konservativen Einstellungen der Osteuropäer. Diese machen jedoch immer deutlicher, dass sie in der Zukunft ihren Einfluss verstärkt geltend machen werden.

Dass sich der Medianvermögenswert der Haushalte in Teilen Südeuropas, wie im Falle Italiens, teilweise deutlich über dem der Deutschen befindet – mit rund 161.000 Euro –, ist eine ernüchternde Bestandsaufnahme. In Polen liegt der Medianwert inzwischen bei über 70.000 Euro, mit stark steigender Tendenz. Auch Ungarn holt rasch auf. Deutschland hingegen stagniert. ..."

Osteuropa auf der Überholspur "Osteuropa schließt bei der Vermögensbildung schrittweise zu Deutschland auf. Das Bekenntnis zu konservativen Werten, Marktwirtschaft und einer positiven Arbeitsethik zahlt sich aus."

India's Millionaire Boom Leads Wealth Creation Spree with Palki Sharma

Impressive!

In million US dollars

Catching up fast with China!

Unequal foundations (size of residential buildings): Tracing the origin of wealth inequality across 10,000 years. Really!

I have my doubts whether the size of residential buildings is a good metric of or proxy for wealth distribution over time. What if e.g. customs, inheritance and cultural views about private residences changed over time? What about large families versus smaller families etc.?

"Economic inequality is one of our primary global challenges and is a key research topic for archaeology — why do some societies become deeply unequal while others remain more balanced? What clues about our economic past are hidden in the ruins of ancient homes? 

A recent Special Feature in PNAS ... highlights papers by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and economists exploring these questions using a global database of over 53,000 residential buildings from about 4,000 archaeological settlements.

Residential building size offers a durable and widely available proxy for household wealth, write the editors in the Special Feature introduction. By analyzing differences in house size, the papers in this issue offer a standardized, cross-cultural, and long-term perspective on economic inequality extending well into periods before writing emerged. 

Differences in house sizes over time record when and how wealth gaps emerged, shifted, and sometimes narrowed across 10,000 years of human history. ..."

Unequal foundations: Tracing the origin of wealth inequality across 10,000 years | Santa Fe Institute

The Global Dynamics of Inequality over the Long Term (no public access) "The Global Dynamics of Economic Inequality over the Long Term Special Feature brings together archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and economists to analyze inequality using a global database of archaeological and ethnographic records. By examining house-size differences as a key measure of wealth—encompassing material goods, social connections, and household size—this research tracks patterns of inequality across diverse societies over the past 10,000 years. This Special Feature provides a standardized, cross-cultural, and long-term assessment of economic inequality, offering new insights into its causes, variability, and consequences for societal well-being and longevity."

About 52 million of the world's Millionaires ($1-$5 million in assets) Now Hold $107 Trillion in assets

Amazing stuff!

"The number of EMILLIs—”Everyday Millionaires” with $1 million to $5 million in assets—has jumped from 13 million in 2000 to nearly 52 million by the end of 2024, according to UBS’s 2025 Global Wealth Report.

Together, they now hold $107 trillion in assets, nearly matching the wealth of those with more than $5 million.

UBS attributes the surge to rising home values, broader access to financial markets, entrepreneurship, and an $83 trillion generational wealth transfer already in motion. ..."

Tuesday, July 15, 2025 - Join The Flyover

UBS Global Wealth Report 2025

India’s 100 Richest 2024: Fortunes Jump 40% Blowing Past $1 Trillion

Recommendable! Good news!

The Five Richest Women On The 2024 Forbes 400

Recommendable! Only 20% are self-made, most are inherited.

The richest woman in America!

India's booming wealth explosion in focus

Good news!

UBS Global Wealth Report 2024: Growth returns to 4.2% offsetting 2022 slump

Recommendable!

Global Wealth Report 2024: Growth returns to 4.2% offsetting 2022 slump | UBS Global People around the world are getting progressively wealthier – and that doesn’t just apply to those who already own great wealth. Upward wealth mobility is expected to become more pronounced by 2030 and, further out, signs of a horizontal wealth transfer emerge.

Credits: Die Schweizer sind am reichsten

Germany is not listed on the second table anymore!

Meet The World's Richest Self-Made (married) Woman

Recommendable!

The $100 Billion Club: These 14 People Have 12-Figure Fortunes

One Indian, one Mexican, and one French among them.

Mumbai Overtakes Beijing to Become Asia's Billionaire Hub with Palki Sharma

Good news! Impressive! 92 billionaires in total making Mumbai, the financial center of India, the third ranked city in the world with the largest number of billionaires.

Beijing follows with 91 billionaires

India has plenty of room to grow! Too bad Europe was not listed. According to Google Search there are 551 billionaires in Europe

India's Rush For Luxurious Lifestyle | Luxury Housing Market Boom

A rising superpower in pursuit of luxury!

Wealth gap between America's richest and poorest shrinks under Trump

Recommendable! Federal Reserve shows that Trumponomics is working for lower income people (especially for blacks and Hispanics)