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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: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 25 2015, @05:58PM
That's an excuse. Yes, the margin would have narrowed no matter what economic policy we took, but it's completely ridiculous to suggest that it would have happened this quickly or to this extent with competent economic policy. Not to mention that the quality of life would have sunk this low.
There are two things to note. First, I don't buy that the US has "conservative economic policy". The US government wouldn't owe over 70% of the country's GDP in publicly held debt, if that were true.
Second, there's been a lot of wriggling on the hook without any net gain and a huge bunch of policies that claimed to "create jobs" or reduce income inequality when they actually do the opposite. My view is that laissez faire would be better than virtually all efforts to address wage drops, income inequality, or anything else of that nature. There is a certain futility to any economic policy other than laissez faire, namely, that it interferes with the actions of people who simply put, are more competent and knowing than the policy makers.
You see it all over the place, businesses that run themselves out of business because they're chasing next quarter's ratings rather than worrying about what happens years down the road. Companies that spend ridiculous amounts of money on extra employees because they're too cheap to pay a wage that would retain the ones that they had long enough for them to get good at their jobs.
Such a process normally is destructive. We should ask ourselves what incentives are in play to reward such widespread behavior? The answer is that we have labored for around a century to eliminate risk, the harm from bad events, and the negative outcomes from making poor choices. The result is as you state above, a business environment which rewards short term thinkers.