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posted by janrinok on Sunday October 25 2015, @05:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the return-of-feudalism dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by hash14 on Sunday October 25 2015, @02:13PM

    by hash14 (1102) on Sunday October 25 2015, @02:13PM (#254335)

    I think your average humans are normal people.

    I think the problem is that the ones who grab power are inherently evil. Some are evil before they acquire that power, others are simply corrupted by it once they have it. And bear in mind that wealth is power (or at least one form of it).

    The reason they win is because humans simply aren't good at working together on the scales that we need to in order take out these powerful figures. We don't vote for sensible laws and policies, we don't educate each other very well (or think independently), and we sure as hell don't assemble in masses that are sufficient to take that power back.

    So that's why a few evil people will always win out over a community of relatively good people. We wait until it's too late and then it's all gone to hell.

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  • (Score: 2) by Murdoc on Monday October 26 2015, @01:34AM

    by Murdoc (2518) on Monday October 26 2015, @01:34AM (#254478) Homepage

    That's a bit too cynical I think, but I can see how it is easy to come to that conclusion. The fact is that our largest and most advanced societies are much better than most of the ones in history, the kingdoms and dictatorships and empires. We have more freedoms, and a greater standard of living than ever before. It's not just because of technology, but also because of social support. I think that we are capable of working together on these large scales. The problems we are encountering today are not due to inherent human traits, it's the economic system we use: it rewards bad behaviour with wealth and, as you say, that grants power. We have laws to try and prevent and catch crime, but that only catches the criminals that aren't good enough. It's like how antibiotics "create" better diseases; if you don't wipe it out the first time, those that survive create more. Except in the case of criminals they don't necessarily make more criminals, just more wealth so that they become stronger and better able to commit crimes. Become wealthy and powerful enough, and you can influence the laws and the law-enforcement to make you even harder to stop. It's the system's fault, not human nature. The fact that so many humans still manage to find the time and resources to do good things despite being penalized for it shows us what human nature is really about. What we need is a new form of economics that rewards good behaviour instead of bad behaviour. Then people will adjust to that and things will be much better.