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An Oxfam report claims that the world's eight richest billionaires control an amount of wealth equivalent to that of the world's 50% poorest people. That's a dramatic decline from the 62 billionaires estimated in the previous year's report:
In a report published to coincide with the start of the week-long World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Oxfam said it was "beyond grotesque" that a handful of rich men headed by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates are worth $426bn (£350bn), equivalent to the wealth of 3.6 billion people.
[...] Oxfam said the world's poorest 50% owned the same in assets as the $426bn owned by a group headed by Gates, Amancio Ortega, the founder of the Spanish fashion chain Zara, and Warren Buffett, the renowned investor and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway. The others are Carlos Slim Helú: the Mexican telecoms tycoon and owner of conglomerate Grupo Carso; Jeff Bezos: the founder of Amazon; Mark Zuckerberg: the founder of Facebook; Larry Ellison, chief executive of US tech firm Oracle; and Michael Bloomberg; a former mayor of New York and founder and owner of the Bloomberg news and financial information service.
NextBigFuture points out that Oxfam's numbers are skewed by indebtedness.
The Business and Sustainable Development Commission has released a report calling for... sustainable development ahead of the World Economic Forum (from Jan. 17th-20th in Davos, Switzerland):
"Those losing out either economically or environmentally, such as the citizens of smog-choked Asian cities, or socially, through the breakdown of traditional rural communities, are asking whether the costs of our global economy are greater than its benefits," the commission said.
The group's report is a call to action: Corporate leaders must quickly change the way they do business in order to rebuild trust between industry and wider society. Members of the group include Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Mars CEO Grant Reid and Paul Polman, the CEO of Unilever. "We believe radical action is needed," the group said. If businesses need convincing, there's even a monetary incentive: The commission estimates there's $12 trillion to be made in extra growth and savings from sustainable development by 2030. Sectors that could benefit include heath care, clean energy and urban infrastructure.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday January 18 2017, @12:49PM
I'm sorry, but 8 balancing against 3.5 billion is not a goddamn normal distribution.
Can you do better than "because you say so"? Because this is how pro sports work, pro acting, performing arts in general, high level STEM academia, modeling, apparently our current economic system, all naturally highly pyramid shaped with the top guys taking basically all.
And changing the rules of asset accumulation has been remarkably successful in the past.
The best I've seen is some golden handcuffs in white Scandinavian countries. Still handcuffs of course, but at least they're golden. More likely is all the people killed in the Soviet revolution, or Mao's slaughter, or Pol Pot.
It would be nice to see something new, not a rehash of mass murder salad from a century ago.
Possibly this is the Fermi paradox in action. There are no space faring galactic civilizations because no society intelligent enough to go to space can survive the income inequality necessary to fund space travel. So the universe is full of post-petrochemical era Roman Empire level civilizations.