I'd like to see numbers here. There are huge industries that have been built around entertainment and recreation forever: sports, hunting, movies, television, books, music, etc. I expect, as a ratio, we're collectively spending far less on e.g. baseballs and far more on video games. It'd be interesting to see the net real change in society's total non-essential expenditures. I would be quite surprised if it was all that large especially if we do not consider ultra-high end recreation to account for the fact that there are far more upper class and rich individuals now a days, so their recreational spending could make it look like all of society is spending that much more - when that's certainly not your hypothesis.
And Facebook complicates the matter even more. They do not make money by "building things for the entertainment of others". They make money by building one of the most effective datamining and human profiling systems in existence, enabling companies to pay money access the product of this by precisely targeting individuals to compel them to either buy things or be influenced by their brand. It doesn't really answer the question of where money is being spent. Those companies are giving Facebook money because you give those companies your money. What is the distribution and gross effect of that spending?
For some interesting context on "Amazon's dominance", in 2017 they managed a total marketshare of 4% of retail. Surprisingly even if we restrict it to e-commerce only, they 'only' achieved 44%. [1]
It's very easy to agree with what you say, but something that I think is difficult to answer is breaking it down into real numbers. How much do you think somebody should be paid for moving boxes? Again you'd probably like to respond with a phrase like a 'livable wage', but I'm curious about an exact number with a natural understanding that it'd be higher for workers in e.g. San Francisco and lower for workers in the middle of Idaho.
To avoid making this a trap question, I'll give you my response to any number ahead of time. The US GDP/capita is $52k. So if each and every person received a perfectly equal share of every penny created, that'd be a total of $52k. And society certainly sees value in creating a much stronger economic incentive for e.g. being a doctor or an engineer than for moving boxes. So where would you put the number? It's not easy to answer when you consider that the current average salary for our box movers is already about $26k, or 50% of a perfectly equal share of all wealth generated in the nation.
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And I have one other entirely separate question for you, due to the phrasing of your question. Would you have been happier with Amazon had these jobs simply not existed? There's many possibilities there. In the future these jobs will likely be eliminated through automation. Other business situations, such as Apple's, enable them to avoid US blue collar labor by shipping the jobs off to factories in China where conditions and lifestyles are substantially worse than low wage jobs stateside.
I think you're misunderstanding my point. The salary indeed is as a distribution question, and with localized inequality on the rise, this is getting worse every year since around 1973, probably. Beyond that, however, these companies are exchanging humane jobs with rich human interaction for sweatshop/factory/gig jobs.
So as you say, hopefully automation will make all these jobs superfluous in the future. After which, then, the question becomes: So how will those having lost those already shitty jobs fare then? I have my doubts the answer will be "better..."
So yes, I am all for less regulation and state interference overall - if in exchange the world can become a nicer place for the "average Joe" to live in. To reply with your own class of questions: How much more is the landlord's work worth in comparison to his underlings?
> Beyond that, however, these companies are exchanging humane jobs with rich human interaction for sweatshop/factory/gig jobs.
Stacking selves or doing robotic, scripted interactions as a cashier in a regular big store is probably not that much better than working in Amazon's warehouse.
What you're probably referring to with 1973 is probably something like the increasingly lopsided share of income on the top of society. To put some exact numbers to your intuition in 1979 the middle class controlled 46% of all income, and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%. Today (as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% with the middle class left with 26%. [1] There's even been a chiseling out of the middle class as a whole declining from 38.8% of society to 32% of society. I also find these topics fascinating. But that paper also has another datum in it that was completely eye opening to me. This is the change in the size of each economic group as measured by share of total income from 1979 to 2014.
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- Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8%
- Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4%
- Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32%
- Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1%
- Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8%
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That's a very positive and rapid change. As another example China is experiencing something similar on a very rapid scale. They've gone from a relatively egalitarian society, to one where you have billionaires alongside people putting together $1000 iPhones living in on-site dormitories with suicide nets lining the building, working for a couple of bucks an hour. The contrast is stark, yet at the same time their overall population is starting to benefit from unprecedented opportunity and a gradual upward push. And what's left out of that picture is that even there those workers are striving for greater things, taking that money and then using it to return to their villages and open businesses of their own hoping to get their own piece of the pie. As an extreme example there Jack Ma, now one of the richest people in the world, spent years manually biking, what would have been from his perspective, 'rich' tourists around in China from international hotels.
Maybe the biggest point about the $52k figure is how shockingly small it really is. That's with all these crazy motivations for people to earn and generate as much as they possibly can, and then some. At times it might seem that post-scarcity is just a matter of logistics and benevolence, but that's just not justified by the actual numbers. So in the mean time, rather than dream of utopia, we need to create systems that enable people with sufficient drive to get as far as they can. And while our system has an immense number of flaws, I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with a robust alternative. Social systems have a strong allure, but I think this conflict of reality and ideology is really the fundamental reason that these systems collapse, in brief order, time and again - often with extreme consequences. China's inequality may be off putting now, but it wasn't 60 years ago that Chinese were dying and starving to death by the tens of millions in their execution of a so-called 'Great Leap Forward' to a full on social system. Ultimately you need to keep perspective in mind.
I sometimes think our views might be to 'current-centric' when considering a post automation era.
In my mind one of the most distinguishing features of the labor world today is the growth of complete independence. You have solitary people start software companies and independently design, develop, and publish products that go on to earn billions. I think a big part of this is the efficiency created by current systems. The economic systems to handle payments are almost entirely automated. The system of publication processes payments and delivers product in an entirely automated fashion. And consumers can learn about and purchase your product also using fully automated systems. Compare that to times when software was sold exclusively in retail outlets. For that matter you don't even have to go that far back to times when computers themselves were outside the reach of all except the most elite of society rendering such economic possibilities moot.
And I think this trend of independence is something that will likely continue going forward. Imagine in a post automation world where things like industrial level machining and eventually even things like semiconductor fabrications become as accessible as PCs were let's say 30 years ago. This is a game changer that I think is going to be extremely difficult to predict the implications of. For that matter imagine automated construction bots capable of executing building designs all the way from ground clearance on up.
Let's get more agrarian. Consider things like automated micro-farms. People could use these for their own nourishment, but then there's also the possibility of automated delivery systems enabling user-to-user distribution systems where people could even make a living off of their land in an autonomous fashion. Right there are vast amounts of great arable land in the US that's for sale for next to nothing. In some cases you can get land literally for free. But without automation it's not so straight forward to monetize this. What would be the implications, if it did become possible? 4 acres and a bot?
The whole point here is that I think by focusing on training as a means of contributing to a large company as a means of earning a living is not necessarily something that will be a given in the future. These large companies are the ones that have the means and motivation to eliminate these jobs. The present already rewards independence vastly more than dependent labor and this is a trend I think we'll see grow exponentially in the era of automation. And that has very difficult to even imagine implications.
A reasonable litmus test for monopoly is whether they would fail if they started exploiting their customers.
Time Warner and Comcast pass this test. They refuse to compete and then aggressively raise prices, seemingly to no end, knowing full well their customers have no choice. Microsoft's Windows 10 also passes this test with extreme anti-customer behavior that relies exclusively on consumers tolerating only due to a lack of choice.
Now back to Amazon. If they started ramping up their prices they would fail, fail hard, and fail practically overnight. There's a difference between a company being incredibly efficient and passing, with great success, that efficiency onto consumers and monopolies. Another general trend in monopolies is that they generally rely on tertiary forces to prevent competition. For the telecoms, this is the lack of access to wiring or even simply poles. For Windows, it's native execution of decades of third party software as well as the vast majority of all consumer software written today. There's no barrier to competing with Amazon, you're just not going to do it as well as them. It's the same reason WalMarts destroy small local businesses.
I think many people tend to grossly overestimate the profit levels of large companies. Let's take Amazon since they're arguably the reason for the failure here and a company I think many perceive to be lush with money largely because of 'greed.' It also hits on notions from this paper like companies just not hiring enough employees, even if only at certain times.
Amazon currently grosses $178 billion. However, their net income is what matters. That's what's left over after paying cost of goods, salaries, rent, taxes, and so on. Basically what's left over after the mandatory expenses to keep your company running. And that's only $3 billion. 'Only' sounds funny preceding $3,000,000,000 and is undoubtedly what leads to complaints against Amazon (and here as well) that they're just being greedy, not paying employees enough, and so on.
But that's not really accurate. Amazon has 566,000 employees. If they gave each employee a $1000 raise. For those working your average 2000+ hour year that's a whopping $0.50/hour raise. Yet that marginal raise amounts to $0.56billion, or 1/6th of their entire remaining revenue. Interestingly enough 1 executive earning $1million in compensation is, by contrast, only 1/3000th of their remaining revenue. This critical calculation on the number of workers to fill any given role is why compensation and things can seem so lopsided. The sheer magnitude of the number of workers at many of these companies is very counter intuitive.
And this is the case for most large small margin companies. Back to Barnes and Noble, in 2016 they had a net income of -$24.5 million with 26,000 employees. Try to keep those figures in mind when considering this. I think the post that described any real solution for them as akin to 'shuffling chairs on the Titanic' is very apt.
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If anybody has a counter point here, I'd love to hear it. From my perspective it seems people are replacing reality with ideology, whether intentionally or not. We want to blame companies for being greedy, even when in reality the numbers don't really support such views. All jobs are disappearing, when we have 4.1% unemployment (even the U6 is down to 8.2%!), etc. I used to feel very similarly, but the numbers simply don't support these incredibly cynical views.
I think people are more bothered by the stupidity of BN leadership than by their greed. Corporate is defining policy which is actively contributing to significant drops in store sales and then laying off all of their full-time retail employees which will further drive down their revenue. They used to be a very strong brand.
You are being downvoted because Amazon is a bad example. They are intentionally not profitable so that they can lower prices to drive others out of the market and reinvest all revenue into R&D and horizontal expansion. They could net way more than $3B if they wanted to.
I could not care less about downvotes, but I enjoy discussion. And I certainly think people would like to disagree with me, but it seems none are really able or willing to form coherent counter points - which I think puts a very sad frame on the disagreement. So I thank you for changing that, though I think there's something you may not have considered in your logic.
At the most basic level we can view a company's profitability as a price vs demand curve. If your price is too low then you're leaving money on the table. If it's too high then you're also losing money since you could earn more by charging less to more people. And I'm sure you'd agree that all companies are really trying to maximize that curve.
But the thing here is that competition is not some tertiary element not considered in our basic price vs demand curve. It's in most cases the single biggest driving factor of the demand function. When there's no real competition, you can increase your prices quite recklessly - see Time Warner or Comcast. But the amount that Amazon can increase their prices is strictly limited due to competition. If you're going to buy an electronic component do you buy it at e.g. New Egg or Amazon? It doesn't really matter if its the same thing - you're just going to go with wherever is cheaper in net (e.g. factoring in rewards/shipping/etc), even if that price difference is really quite small. The point here is that while you may think that Amazon could raise their prices let's say 5% and see a 1-2% growth in profit, but this is a question that they are undoubtedly constantly researching - and they disagree.
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And in any case this is literally the case for most all small margin businesses. For instance WalMart has 2.3 million employees and $13.6 billion net. Our $1k/year raise costs them $2.3 billion, or 1/6th of their entire available income. The only companies that are truly lush with money are companies that sell their product at extremely high markups, or companies whose product enables the minimize labor, such as software. For instance Apple, as an example of the former, nets $48.4 billion with 123,000 employees. A $1000/year raise there would work out to 1/400th of their available revenue. Google/Alphabet, as an example of the latter, had a bad year last year, but generally net around $20 billion on 72,000 employees. Their $1k raise works out to about 1/278th of their available revenue. It creates an ironic result that few people would complain about the wages Google or Apple offer, yet they actually offer their employees a far less 'fair' share of revenues than do the companies that people consider greedy.
I believe his point with 'hostile' is to choose nations where they would be both likely and able to say 'no' should the host nation of an individual request sensitive information on the individual in question.
For instance Switzerland had some of the most secure and private banking in the world. It was actually a criminal act in Switzerland to reveal the name of an account holder - to anybody, including governments. And so if the US were to request information on a possible US account holder, they would be likely to say no. But given the influence of the US on both Switzerland and on the nations it most heavily depends upon, they've proven themselves unable to say no, and ended up passing all sorts of special laws, just to bend over to US requests that infringed their nation laws and more generally their sovereignty.
Another interesting example with Switzerland is Champagne. Champagne, Switzerland has been making a local wine known as Champagne since the 9th century. Many centuries before the champagne of France even existed. In 2004 the EU told them to stop using the name. And again even if they were likely to say no, they would be unable to do so. As another interesting aside Champagne, using the ubiquitous méthode champenoise, was not invented in France. It was created by an Englishman. What a sordid tale that little drink has!
Would Finland be likely to say no? I don't know - I have very little knowledge of the security arrangements between Finland and the US. Would they be able to say no to the US? Not a chance.
There's a difference between news and editorial that has been increasingly lost. To give an exaggerated example:
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- Air strikes in the US killed 15 targets in Mideastland. Representatives for the US armed forces stated the targets were high priority leaders of Al Boom Boom. Domestic news in Mideastland claims that the strike was on a hospital. There has been no definitive identification of the victims yet.
- The never ending war machine of the US continues to ravage Mideastland as a brutal attack on a hospital where many women and children were being treated has been destroyed with mass casualties reported. Here's a sad picture of a baby by some rubble that's not related to this incident.
- An elite fleet of aerial forces unleashed a precision surgical strike in Mideastland decapitating important parts of the leadership of the extremist terrorist organization Al Boom Boom. Locals were reportedly seen celebrating and toppling a statue of the fascist organization while waving US flags and singing the US national anthem.
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There will, of course, be an unavoidable bias in what is covered since not it's literally impossible to cover everything. But in how things are covered, removing bias is not difficult and it's also testable. If an average reader can, with reasonable accuracy, state the biases and inclinings of the author of a news piece then it is biased.
The extreme bias in the news today is very much a contemporary thing. Here [1] are a list of online newspaper archives. Most are free and some go all the way back to the 1800s. Compare then and now, and the difference is quite extreme. I expect we're going through a time today that people will look back on with some degree of bewilderment, not dissimilar to how we might think of things like the two red scares we've gone through. We, collectively, seem to lose our ability to think coherently and impartially quite easily, but at least historically it tends to right itself quickly enough.
Four Russian nationals, and perhaps dozens more, were killed in fighting between pro-government forces in eastern Syria and members of the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, according to Russian and Syrian officials.
The article makes absolutely no judgement on the strike itself. It stresses the limits of information currently available, and quotes dozens of sources from all sides.
It then goes on to show, with lots of evidence, that such irregular Russian soldiers actually are in Syria. While people will probably latch onto this part as somehow being biased against Russia, it would be journalistic malpractice not to mention, for example, Crimea, where the exact same dynamic played out. I. e. denials of irregular troops being involved quickly being proven to be lies with Russia's official annexation of Crimea.
There is still bias in the form of choice of news to report. You may agree or disagree with that bias, and certainly some do a better job than others in reducing it, but it simply is not possible to avoid it, not least because many things are not objective.
E.g. "pro-government forces" is factual, but many supporters of the "members of the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State", which is also factual, will consider it pro-Assad bias to use such neutral language about both sides, and vice versa, exactly because it leaves out the background.
And there is not single, objective unbiased solution to that, even if you ignore that their very selection of what to report on also inevitably will be biased.
Personally I prefer openly biased sources, because then I don't have to deal with reporters pretending to be neutral while including or omitting information on the basis of biases anyway.
Yes, of course, if "it is factual, but people will call such neutral language biased" then there's mo argument here, and we can all go home and it doesn't matter if we have journalists or just read a random number generator's output.
But I was making an argument within the context of the parent, which was giving some absurdly biased "examples" and passing them of as something typical for today's top publication. And that's just not true.
Thanks for the article. Let's look over this since I see it rather differently.
The article states, "there are hundreds if not thousands of contract soldiers in Syria whom the Russian government has never acknowledged." According to whom and why? And if their estimate is so unreliable as to have an error margin on the order of magnitudes would it not be more accurate to state an unknown number? Anyhow, they not only take their controversial statement as a given, but then go on to offer a completely bizarre explanation for why they were deployed. According to the article, "They were deployed both to help keep the official cost down and to avoid reports of casualties, especially with a March presidential election in Russia fast approaching.". Again according to who? And idea that these secret soldiers are because of an election seems dubious, at best. Putin's approval rating is around 75% with 0 substantial opposition. His reelection is little more than a formality regardless of what happens in Syria.
Let's now look at some of their named sources for which you reference "lots of evidence." One bit of evidence was literally what a source, described only as "a woman from central Russia", said in "a brief online chat." And then they reference what they, again literally, describe as "investigative bloggers." And on top of all of this the article originally stated Russians were killed in the airstrike, when the source actually said Syrians. Regardless of whether or not that was a genuine mistake, it really should make you question their editorial standards for such a key fact to be night and day wrong.
There are many other such issues throughout the article, but let's stop there since I think the point is more or less clear. Look at it this way. Imagine this article was discussing an issue for which you had less personal biases, and from an outlet you also had no biases of brand recognition and trust towards. You would consider it to be dubious, at best. When we read things from sources we trust or that confirm our own biases, we turn off our ability to think critically.
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Granted the above is a tangential issue to bias - reporting quality. But the two tend to be strongly connected. When you want to push a story but the data to support such a tale isn't there, you have a choice of either moving on or turning to lower levels of support for your view. And in times past I think the choice there would have been dead obvious for the New York Times. Citing what somebody, who is again literally described as "a woman from Russia", wrote online is insulting the intelligence of your readers and instills a sense of incredulity for the article in the mind of anybody who's not taking what you write as beyond reproach. Nonetheless, they chose (and have regularly chosen now a days) to go down this path. And this is something new.
> There's a difference between news and editorial that has been increasingly lost.
Perhaps, but it doesn't change the fact that unbiased news is impossible; even rigorously bare-facts reporting expressed bias in the decisions of which facts are worth reporting, both on the macro scale (what events get stories) and the micro scale (what aspects of the event and reported.)
> The extreme bias in the news today is very much a contemporary thing.
No, it's not; the diversity of biases found in sources with wide distribution is (and it's particularly a change from the period of extreme media consolidation in the decades just before the explosion of online media), but the degree of bias is not.
I do not think there's very much diversity of bias in today's publications. It mostly breaks down into a very binary partisan split. You have 'liberal outlets' that mostly sound identical and 'conservative outlets' that mostly sound identical.
In the past there was less child-like black and white conflict, but there was vastly more disagreement on views and papers willing to publish things that fell outside the expected grain. The New York Times was a real leader in this regard. My favorite example is probably from an article from 1920. The NYT ran a featured editorial arguing that rockets could not actually work in a vacuum, like space, since 'there would be nothing for its thrust to push back against.'
They were obviously very wrong, but nonetheless were willing to consider views that ran against the grain even for the time. And that is a good thing. Many of the things they were right on were also equally 'out there' at some point, but I'm not mentioning those as we have the bias of 'well that really happened' so the truth doesn't seem as bizarre as it really is.
The problem we have now a days is that the media has become so collusive and incestuous that they rarely publicly disagree, again beyond the partisan split which I can only describe as child-like. And, in my opinion, this is likely intentionally done under a belief that having a unified front would increase their apparent integrity or confidence. Collusive groups like JournoList turned CabaList would work as some evidence towards this. However, at the same time it also completely destroys any notion of competence when everybody gets something so completely wrong. A very recent example of this would be the so-called 'sonic weapons' used 'against' US diplomats in Cuba. In spite of the media going into a unified frenzy of speculation and finger pointing, literally no major outlet took the logical, even if outsider, position that this probably was not even an attack in the first place. And now that it seems like that it indeed was not, it leaves the entire media system looking like a joke. Even when there are only two options (is a weapon, or not a weapon), nobody managed to get it right. That's sadly impressive and again something that was far less frequent an occasion in the past.
There seem to be a couple of major similarities between software development and other jobs with bimodal incomes:
- You do a job that is, in many cases, a company itself. Lawyers, doctors, and developers can all start independent operations since the product of their work, or the service they provide, is monetizable in and of itself.
- There is a very significant skill gap, often driven by enthusiasm at least as much as intelligence, that people rarely transition between.
Compare these fields against something like electrical engineering. There the skill itself is generally a part of a product, rather than a marketable skill in and of itself making independent work difficult. And I don't know that many electrical engineers, but I'm unsure how big of a skill gap there is and, more importantly, what percent of engineers manage to transition upwards in it. If one electrical engineer is, more or less, the same as another - then you're going to see that reflected in income distributions which I would expect look more bell curvy weighted mostly by just years of experience.
"There is a very significant skill gap, often driven by enthusiasm"
Honestly I think its more down to experience.
I know relatively inexperienced developers chasing every new tech on the hype train. And I know others that have been around a while and recognise the new tech as a rehash of something from 20 years ago, with some new marketing.
(To be fair I think you need some enthusiasm as well as the experience otherwise you get the "1 year of experience ten times" developers).
Let's think about money for a minute. Money itself of course has no meaning. But we apply meaning to it. It essentially works as a proxy for the value we assign to labor and materials - both of which are finite in reality. So obviously you'd prefer drivers make more money, so they could live a better life. Well how much? I imagine you think a ballpark for a 'fair' wage would be somewhere around $15/ride. Now let's consider your person that relies on taxi type services for transportation. We'll say they go out and return to their house once a day. And every other day they also go in/out again for entertainment, essentials, and so on. For a 30 day month that's a total of 30 x 2 + (30/2) x 2 = 90 trips. And 90 x 15 = $1350. On a yearly basis that's 365.25 x 3 x 15 = $16,436.
Well that's a lot of money. Of course I expect you'd probably say that that's because the 'bourgeois' are holding back the 'proletariat.' Okay. Let's go full on social system economics. Let's just pretend the entire GDP in the US is spread completely evenly between each and every person. And that's quite unreasonable as our GDP would decrease dramatically under such a system, but for arguments sake I'll give you that. Okay, that's easy. That's the GDP/capita or $52k. The total value of all annual goods and services in the US produced works out to $52k/person/year. But we can't forget about taxes now. To sustain our social utopia we'd need quite a high tax rate. But again, I'm going to let you have that and we'll just maintain current taxes. So we're each taking home about $42k. I'm also going to pretend that state and other taxes don't exist.
Now look at your $15/ride. If somebody was going to depend on that, they'd end up spending nearly 40% of their entire income just getting around even with a perfectly fair share of all income generated nationwide! And I gave you several unreasonably optimistic assumptions that makes that number a real lowball. The point here is that even in what I assume is your idealized system, this would not be a sustainable industry. It's very easy to see things through the lens of a victim complex because of the apparent inequality of our society. But these optics are in large part caused by inconceivably large population numbers. Imagine you earned just $1 from each person on this Earth. You'd be the 65th richest person in the world! Far from a 1%er, you'd be a 0.000000001%er. Earn $12 and you'd be the single richest person alive. Even if we just consider the USA. Imagine you took every penny Bill Gates, currently the richest person in the world, is worth and equally distributed it to each and every person in the US. That'd be a total of $275. Maybe you would say well do that to them all! By the time you're down to the 100 richest person you're only getting $17/person, and again that's for the US population only.
Yes, it's unsustainable to be privately chauffeured around everywhere if you're not wealthy. Is this controversial? It's also ecologically and infrastructurally unsustainable so it's not something anyone actually wants.
Most people in places where wages are livable walk, bike, ride a bus or train or drive themselves around. For the infirm there are subsidized transportation services.
It's 'controversial' only in the sense that most people don't understand this. Many people seem to think that the only reason companies aren't giving great salaries to people, and 'letting' everybody earn a very good living doing most of anything, is greed. The person I was responding to went so far as to call these companies "villains." Or look at the other poster's response to this very topic. In reality, what people want is impossible, and but very few understand that. And I think the nature of this fact is often met with cognitive dissonance of some sort or another, which is sad. We are definitely becoming a nation that has an increasingly tenuous relationship with facts.
If wealth was evenly divided in the US, each household would have $760,000 [1]. Assuming a person spends $16,436 on taxi rides per year (instead of buying a new car every year), that would be 2% of their income, not 40%.
Let's talk about terminology now. First is households. A household in the US is a bit more than 2.5 people. You can go ahead and bump up your costs to $41k a year on transport alone. The next is wealth. Let's hit on two points:
- Wealth is not renewable, which is why income is vastly more important. If you have $100 of wealth and you only spend 10% of it a year. You're completely broke a decade. 'Only' spending 5% of your total wealth on transport per year is a path to very rapid ruin.
- There's nowhere near the amount of 'real' wealth as there is 'paper' wealth, which is the number you're indirectly citing. Most wealth is tied up in the form of various investments, stocks, and so on. When you liquidate these assets, it results in a decline in their value. If you were to liquidate large amounts of market assets into spendable money, simultaneously, you would find the total wealth in the US to be a very small fraction of the numbers stated.
And Facebook complicates the matter even more. They do not make money by "building things for the entertainment of others". They make money by building one of the most effective datamining and human profiling systems in existence, enabling companies to pay money access the product of this by precisely targeting individuals to compel them to either buy things or be influenced by their brand. It doesn't really answer the question of where money is being spent. Those companies are giving Facebook money because you give those companies your money. What is the distribution and gross effect of that spending?