Oxfam released a report on wealth inequality that is hitting the news sites today. It says that from 2009 to 2014 the percentage of world wealth owned by the richest one percent rose from 44% to 48%.
If those figures bear out and the trend continues, it is very troubling for world political health. That's 4% in five years. A simple linear extrapolation of what happens if this continues is the richest one percent owning everything by the year 2079, as 5/4 of 52 = 65.
Given that wealth ~= power, the natural tendency of such a trend unless intensely disrupted is positive feedback acceleration. We are looking at a pharaonic political landscape within this century unless things change drastically from business as usual.
And we just elected the party that favors wealth concentration in its economic policies to control the U.S. Congress. Don't expect leadership towards balance from there.
The scary thing is the kind of political action that swings things the other way tends to be nasty and violent and wanders off topic to concentrate as much or more power in somebody else's hands as often as not.
Hi Ed,
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this. I think we should never look away from this problem. Maybe the credibility of Thomas Piketty's book will make distribution a more acceptable for economists.
You wrote: "The scary thing is the kind of political action that swings things the other way tends to be nasty and violent and wanders off topic to concentrate as much or more power in somebody else's hands as often as not." But I think the most prevalent check on capitalism in the developed world, until Thatcher and Reagan, was the democratic welfare state. Arguably, the hard core revolutions created inspired the welfare state reforms by fear.
cheers,
John