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Common Dreams reports
The world's richest 1 percent now own more wealth than [the remaining] 99 percent combined. This finding comes from Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Report for 2015, [redirects to a PDF] released last week. Last year, Credit Suisse found the richest 1 percent of adults owned 48 percent of global wealth. According to the new report, the [richest] 1 percent now hold 50.4 percent of all the world's household wealth.
Credit Suisse's findings are in line with Oxfam's prediction that global wealth inequality is only becoming greater. Last January, we predicted that the richest 1 percent would capture more than half of all household wealth by 2016. It looks like our prediction was right, but that we were too conservative, since it has happened a year early. Alas, our forecast was confirmed, but it's nothing to celebrate.
When you look at the very top of the global wealth pyramid, the situation is much more alarming. When we first calculated in January 2014, the 85 richest individuals own more wealth than the poorest half of the planet. This trend has also worsened since that time. Last January, it was down to 80 people.
The implications of rising extreme wealth inequality are greatly worrying. The highly unbalanced concentration of economic resources in the hands of fewer and fewer people impacts social stability within countries and threatens security on a global scale. It makes poverty reduction harder, threatens political inclusion, and compounds other inequalities.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by iwoloschin on Sunday October 25 2015, @01:02PM
Uh, it's pretty much all or nothing. Those few elite folks can't maintain their standard of living by themselves. Like it or not, a single "elite" family has an enormous supply chain that is literally impossible to maintain without significant middle class labor. If the middle class gets blasted back into the stone age there's no way the elite are going to survive unscathed, even if they have doomsday bunkers that are equipped to last for decades or centuries.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday October 25 2015, @02:27PM
The middle class is being replaced with automation.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday October 26 2015, @05:03AM
I think that the elite don't (for the most part) have the forethought to see that. Most of the elite didn't get that way through intelligence, they got that way because they are sociopaths.