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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 25 2015, @03:02PM
Paul Allen and Larry Ellison, among others, seem pretty good at finding ways to spend their vast wealth.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 26 2015, @03:05AM
No individual can compete with a swarm of millions on efficient use of wealth. No matter how clever those guys are, they cannot make millions of spending decisions every day, for the very simple reason that they don't have enough hours in the day. Maybe AI could assist them, if we had AI capable of doing so, which we don't, not yet. They have no choice but a combination of sitting on and wasting their vast wealth.
Stories of how damaging poverty is are legion. What's not so appreciated is how damaging extreme concentration of wealth is, even to the wealthy. The super rich individual is going to have trouble with sanity checks. Michael Jackson died in part because he had the wealth to hire a personal physician not to give him the best care, but to rubber stamp his medical decisions despite ignorance and risk. Anyone can make a bad decision of course, and getting yourself killed off is frighteningly easy-- like, just drive a car at 100 mph into a brick wall, jump off a high bridge, shoot yourself, etc. But most of us haven't the means and opportunity to do the kind of crazy dangerous acts that take serious wealth. It is a little harder to kill yourself off in a Chevy than in a Lamborghini, and to pave the way by mentally impairing yourself with expensive recreational drugs rather than alcohol.
Bad enough that an excessively wealthy and powerful individual can lose their self control or grip on reality and lurch from one near fatal accident to another until finally it is fatal, and no one has the authority to stop them. Where it gets really dangerous is when these individuals have the power to drag entire nations with them to the brink. That's a big part of what happened to the Western Roman Empire. Not even 100 years after the split into East and West, the West fell, and it was the concentration of authority in one individual, an Emperor, and the insane acts of many of the last Emperors that played a major part in the destruction. Possibly their insanity was fueled by lead poisoning. More than one Emperor is infamous for murdering his best general, out of paranoid fear that the general was plotting to overthrow him. And no one stopped or arrested them, the empire even let these Emperors continue as Emperor! He was above the law. He was eventually deposed by the real plotters who had hoped to provoke the fall from favor of this general, by feeding his paranoia, but it took far too long. It certainly wasn't the first time in history that absolute authority turned out to be a single point of failure, but those particular episodes were one train wreck right after another, and the result was total disaster.
We hope that such insanity is unthinkable today. If a President of the United States whipped out a pistol and shot a respected general in front of Congress, he would very quickly be removed from power. Within minutes, we would turn authority over to the Vice President, and the President would be hauled off to have his head examined. But we have a handful of extremely wealthy people who lurk in the shadows, who have nearly that much impunity, and who harbor considerable delusion about the world. This Rupert Murdoch, what is he trying to do? Act as if the world works in a way that it does not, and is so determined to have it his way that he is willing to resort to propaganda, browbeating and bullying, and he's so arrogant he will not listen to wiser and smarter voices. Why can't we stop this fool? Why do so many of us listen to him?