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Only 1% of World's Population Grabbed 82% of all 2017 Wealth

posted by martyb on Saturday January 27 2018, @12:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-got-mine!-And-Yours.-And-Yours.-Annnnnd-yours,-too. dept.

canopic jug writes:

The 1% grabbed 82% of all wealth created in 2017

More than $8 of every $10 of wealth created last year went to the richest 1%.

That's according to a new report from Oxfam International, which estimates that the bottom 50% of the world's population saw no increase in wealth.

Oxfam says the trend shows that the global economy is skewed in favor of the rich, rewarding wealth instead of work.

"The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system," said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International.

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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday January 28 2018, @12:09AM

    by Arik (4543) on Sunday January 28 2018, @12:09AM (#629228) Journal
    "But there's little evidence that paying a CEO 200 times the average worker rather than 100 times the average worker salary is actually making companies better or more successful or more efficient or whatever."

    This is a very good and underappreciated point.

    The sort of naïve libertarian view that one hears at times is that the fact they are able to find work at that pay shows they are worth it, and there is a level of truth to that. We don't have a better definition of value than what we're willing to pay for something. In theory, if companies are overpaying for certain positions this should work itself out in the long run as they fail or improve. In practice this is no free market and some companies are 'too big to fail.'

    "As I noted in a post above, wealth provides incentives for innovation, but at some level of concentration it stops benefitting the rest of society"

    Does it really? I'm not sure that's proven.

    But at any rate, assuming it does, it remains that society benefits very much from respect for private property, and it's virtually impossible to implement any sort of top-down redistribution scheme without brutally violating that principle. So it's clearly better to focus on *preventing* criminal concentration of wealth from occurring than on breaking up existing concentrations (minus proven derivation from criminal activity, of course.)
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