Here is page 7 of an OXFAM report, Inequity Kills:
What’s not necessarily well known is that the Forbes and Bloomberg ‘Top 10 Richest’ lists never includes some of the richest and wealthiest families which have accumulated wealth above and beyond anyone on these lists… there is a lot more extreme wealth than these lists suggest.
Add to this the first two sentences in the report’s summary:
“A new billionaire has been created every 26 hours since the pandemic began. 6 The world’s 10 richest men have doubled their fortunes, while over 160 million people are projected to have been pushed into poverty.”
This kind of lopsided wealth distribution simply can’t be sustained. And yet in the hardest times of the pandemic, when many low wage people couldn’t work, prices and inflation skyrocketed while corporations that produce oil, and sell groceries, reported their greatest profits in years. They also returned their largest dividends to stock holders… most of whom are already very rich and can afford to hold a significant amount of stocks. We’ve all heard the saying, ‘The rich get richer while the poor get poorer,’ and it seems that this is more true now than it ever has.
I stumbled onto this report after reading this article on NPR, “Move over, Jeff Bezos. India’s richest man is now wealthier than the Amazon founder“. The Billionaire club used to be almost exclusively a Saudi and USA thing, other than old family wealth, but now it’s a global phenomenon. Everywhere in the world there are small groups of people accumulating wealth in significant size, while there are populations in significant size that are dropping below the poverty line. This simply isn’t sustainable. That said, I don’t see anything upsetting this trend in the near future. Further, I’m at a loss to think of how this will change in the coming years?
At what point does a society with a few people owning more than half of the global wealth become unproductive for the wealthy? The abject poor can’t by the products the rich manufacture. The suffering middle class with less-than-ever disposable income, and more-than-ever accumulated debt soon won’t be able to help either. So what breaks? How does this self-correct?
I certainly don’t have any answers.
