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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 Murdoc on Monday October 26 2015, @01:25AM
You are so right here. Human beings are capable of greater levels of cooperation and charity than any other animal. Part of that is due to our intelligence, but just being smart doesn't mean that you'll cooperate well. We could all be very cunning in our backstabbing each other, and yet we have created large nations and even groups of nations that are capable of providing aid to other groups and nations. No other animal does this. Sure, we have lots of bad behaviour going on, but that's because we are continuing to use an economic system that rewards bad behaviour. Crime pays, as long as you can get away with it. The law just catches the criminals that aren't good enough, so the ones that are get rewarded with wealth and power. With enough wealth and power you can manipulate the laws and law-enforcement to make you even harder to catch (do CEOs or corporations go to jail?). If we could use a different system that didn't reward bad behaviour, and rewarded good behaviour instead, humans would adjust to that, and our natural abilities to be "good" would flourish.
In fact, the fact that we live in such system that rewards bad behaviour and penalizes good behaviour (volunteers and those that give to charity lose wealth and therefore power as well), and many people still manage to be good (look at all the volunteers and those that give to charity; heck, even open source programmers are a great example of this), is a testament to the very "human" quality we have to try to be good. And there is good reason for that: Being good creates better societies, which in turn give a better standard of living. Do you think we'd have charity and social programs if we were living in a dictatorship?