If all of the 1% just died overnight how would it affect us?
I guess we would loose a few really great musicians and artists…. But would enough world leaders die to change things?
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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You'd just end up with a new set of oligarchs taking their place. The issue isn't with specific individuals, it's with the system that produces them and keeps them in power. Until these power structures are dismantled, nothing's going to change.
Depends how they die.
Ironically, fear will keep them in line
I mean sure if the workers organizes a revolution, and established the dictatorship of the working class. That's a proven way to keep these people in line.
Ummmm…. Wait…
That’s not a dictatorship lol
Yes is is, any class based society is a dictatorship of one class over the other. You either have capitalists or the workers in charge of society. As Anna Louise Strong puts it in This Soviet World:
Overnight?
If it happened overnight, every company in the Dow and many many countries would immediately lose all leadership.
Have you ever worked at a large company? The leadership does jack shit there. A CEO left for a different gig at one place I worked at, and it took a year to replace him. Nothing at all visibly changed during that time. All companies are run by the workers, and they're what holds the company together.
Tell me more lol
That's basically the story. We had no CEO for over a year, a large org around 400 people or so. People just kept doing their work, and things kept running along.
Amusingly, the most disruptive part was actually the new CEO coming on board, because naturally he had to show that he had his own ideas. So he decided to change a bunch of processes just for the sake of it.
If all of the 1% just died overnight how would it affect us?
it would only have an impact if you prevented a new crop of 1 percenters from inheriting all the money like china is doing to their billionaires.
I would still be sad about losing cool artists and musicians and poets and thinkers and bohemian starving artists or whatever it is
Oh wait, we are talking about the wrong kind of wealth.
Edit: my bad
I wonder if it would cause political apathy in the us at least. It is comforting to think, problem solved, and ignore wealth inequality until the tension again sufficiently increases so as to be unnoticeable.
I think people see wealth inequality as the guy at the stoplight having a new car while my car is 3 years old.
I don’t think people understand what the term actually means.
As a math enjoyer, I'm saddened by your reminder that basic numeracy is not a given in the us. I let myself forget that for a while.
I mean, to be fair, the level of wealth inequality is to the level of being several orders of magnitude beyond any numbers that anyone uses in daily life.
Politicians news reports on billions and trillions of dollars for this or that thing, but I don’t think most of us have a grasp.
I don’t even think the billionaires have a grasp, they just think they still need more.