http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42745853

People will debate the exact figures I am sure but can the world really sustain this sort of imbalance?

I can’t help but think this paradox opens the door for the likes of Trump and Brexit. Legal, mass protest votes.

More to the point, people lashing out in all directions but the real issues and people involved are very much hidden away.

can the world really sustain this sort of imbalance?

Always has, probably always will.

Not such a surprise really. This level of imbalance happens in many industries.

Music industry in the UK – 1% of the artists take 90% of the money.
Professional sports are close too.

Is this better of worse than say 100 years ago? I think there is a rose tint that says everyone in the past had more of the wealth but that might just be a baby boomer phenomenon. When I studied history at school it looked like life was relatively crappy for most people throughout history

Raping and pillaging was once normal as well, doesn’t mean we should go back to the days of Ghengis Khan because…. history.

No shock their, the ambitious will always do better than those not so.

This is one thing that annoys me about politicians talking about hard working families,
Hard work like crushing rocks is never gonna pay its way , work smarter is what people ought to do, whether that is get further education and or build up transferable skills and move up the ladder

Good for them for having the ambition to achieve. Seems a lot of people expect something for nothing these days.

But if all the people crushing rocks traded up then there would be no one to crush rocks and make money for those at the top?

Some balance is needed but also people do need to become better educated.

No shock their, the ambitious will always do better than those not so.

Where you’re born and the family you’re born into likely has a bigger influence. Most of the truly poor people in the world work a lot harder than your average successful western businessman, they just do it to get water & food etc.

Playing Devil’s advocate – could the world sustain it if the wealth was shared more evenly and billions more could afford to consume stuff and produce waste like we currently do?
Best to just stick to bickering about ‘national’ issues 🙁

Lovely attitude there oldtalent, so 42 people hold as much wealth as the worlds poorest 3.7 billion people. 3.7 billion people lack the ambition to escape the vicious cycle of developing world poverty, that those billionaires exploit for higher overheads?

could the world sustain it if the wealth was shared more evenly and billions more could afford

Yes, because we’d be consuming less due to price rises. The developing worlds birth rate would also plummet given better opportunities.

The people who object to a more equitable world are usually scumbag social darwinists who view the rest of the world through colonial tinted lenses.

Oxfam come out with these sorts of figures every year and they seldom stand up to much scrutiny. More or less did a good analysis a couple of years ago.

That’s not to say there isn’t a huge wealth gap across the world but Oxfams figures are likely questionable and published to get a headline more than anything else.

Oxfam has a mission to support – fair enough – but they miss the significant narrowing of income and wealth inequality globally and the fact that income inequality has narrowed here in the past 10 years (see ONS report a few days ago) and there is nothing new new about inequality. Current teens are not out of sync with long term historical averages

That’s not an excuse BTW just we need to talk about facts not fiction with these issues

Its harder for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven than to pass a camel etc. I wonder how some folk get their square peg in their round hole.

However much apologists / devout adherent to right wing politics who trust the market to deliver “trickle down” the reality is we could end hunger and millions of preventable diseases if we were fairer with wealth distribution. Its just not justifiable. Even if we took half their wealth they would still be filthy rich
the end result of capitalism is always going to be the very poor dying in hunger an the very rich living in splendour beyond anyone wildest dreams or needs.

I trust those apologists above for such grotesque inequality are all squillionaires, I doubt it somehow. Kiss the a*** of the rich and what do you get?

Sounds bad when framed like that, but in reality it’s not. There has never been a better time to be alive and the improvements made in the last couple of decades are nothing short of startling.

Source…

Nice graph, be interesting to see a little more granularity on that though.
edit this one

Improving but not getting awesome yet

Another interesting fact, to get into the top 1% you need to earn $32,400. Which is the average income in the UK.

If you actually want to do something to address the wealth inequality across the world population the focussing on a few very rich people is a distraction. It makes for arresting headlines but it isn’t actually all that helpful.

the focussing on a few very rich people is a distraction

Oh the irony ; that “point”, which fails to address the issue, is the distraction

If you took all the wealth of those people and distributed it throughout the rest of the population it would make very little difference to the levels of poverty. Focus on a few rich people if it makes you feel better but you won’t reduce poverty that way.

It will get worse now there is a global market as people tend to buy the things that others have got, and hence the people at the top of these Corps make billions, think Apple, Nike or Facebook. You can help a little by buying from the smaller guys.

However, that ain’t going to solve the problem of starving masses in Africa, as the problem there isn’t simply fixed by money, it is much, much deeper than that.

f you took all the wealth of those people and distributed it throughout the rest of the population it would make very little difference to the levels of poverty. Focus on a few rich people if it makes you feel better but you won’t reduce poverty that way.

Does this make any sense? Isn’t all wealth relative? How can you solve poverty whilst maintaining such huge wealth inequalities?

Oxfam has a mission to support

Yes – their mission is to try and stop people being ****. Shockingly controversial, I know.

can the world really sustain this sort of imbalance?

Yeah easy, money is an arbitrary thing and there’s enough useless tat for rich people to spend theirs on. If the only commodities were food, clothing and shelter then it would be another matter – and it wouldn’t be everyone starving whilst a few people got fat either, we had that in the past, no, when that happens people lose their heads and balance is restored.

It’s arithmetic. You’d likely give everyone a couple of hundred quid. But remember as this is wealth, not income, you only get to do it once. Ask yourself this, would such a distribution of a relatively small amount of money really help matters in the long run?

Ask yourself this, would such a distribution of a relatively small amount of money really help matters in the long run?

It’s about how you hold these things and how things are used, take Norway and their oil for example
https://www.ft.com/content/3f3f75c4-9d0c-11e7-8cd4-932067fbf946
The people getting wealthy from African ores and oils are not the people there, same as is happening in other developing countries.

I agree and it is things like that that have the potential to make a difference. Bear in mind that is is also people like us (those in the West with pensions invested in the stock market) that get wealthy off the back of mineral extraction.

It’s arithmetic. You’d likely give everyone a couple of hundred quid. But remember as this is wealth, not income, you only get to do it once. Ask yourself this, would such a distribution of a relatively small amount of money really help matters in the long run?

Depend what you do with it.

For example Clarkson blew his old house up (with explosives) and built a new one. Lets say that stunt cost £5 million and about 3,000 days labour.

Now would that 3000 days (and £5million) have paid for ~1500 villages to get fresh water, or run a school for 20 years?

Now carry on down the population (because that ‘1%’ covers a lot of the UK, not just millionaires). Would you sacrifice a new set of tyres for your bike (in context, about as pointless as Clarksons new house) to give a village a well?

You can also choose to invest more ethically, pick what you work with and what your able to change. Although we could just all do nothing.

Now would that 3000 days (and £5million) have paid for ~1500 villages to get fresh water, or run a school for 20 years?

A great thing to do but it doesn’t by itself do anything to address poverty. Extending it beyond just afew extremely rich people would likely make more of a difference but when invest in education or clean water you don’t directly change how wealthy people are.

Just the be clear I’m not advocating doing nothing but just because it’s an organisation like Oxfam first put them beyond valid criticism.

A great thing to do but it doesn’t by itself do anything to address poverty. Extending it beyond just afew extremely rich people would likely make more of a difference but when invest in education or clean water you don’t directly change how wealthy people are.

Someone once said that the opposite of poverty is not wealth but justice. Your statement seems to be saying that by providing the most poverty-stricken with clean water and education does nothing to change their wealth? This depends entirely on ones definition of ‘wealth’. Is it a sum game where you are ‘wealthy’ if you have water, crops and education while your neighbours (wherever they are) have neither?

The wealth of a community or an individual? Etc etc.

Your statement seems to be saying that by providing the most poverty-stricken with clean water and education does nothing to change their wealth? This depends entirely on ones definition of ‘wealth’.

Well in the context of the original article, and specifically the type of claims that Oxfam make at this time of year (this is the third such claim that I can recall), providing clean water does not change their wealth. The Oxfam claim clearly references money and only money, it doesn’t say that 1% of the population has hoarded 82% of the worlds water.

For clarity (again) I think that moves to help reduce poverty world wide are a GOOD THING. At the same time I think that statement,s like the one originally, referenced from Oxfam are misleading at best and a distraction from achieving any actual reduction in addressing the wealth gap.

Posting that has made me re-read the article and there are other points where I wasn’t correct. When I was refereeing to redistribution of wealth to the poorest being point less I was referring tot he wealth of the super rich. This part of the article

Oxfam has produced similar reports for the past five years. In 2017 it calculated that the world’s eight richest individuals had as much wealth as the poorest half of the world.

This year, it said 42 people now had as much wealth as the poorest half, but it revised last year’s figure to 61. Oxfam said the revision was due to improved data and said the trend of “widening inequality” remained.

not the wealthiest 1% in the world. To do that would be interesting though as it only takes around £550,000 of total assets (including equity in your home, pension funds etc) to get into that club and there are an awful lot of people in that group, myself included.

invest in education or clean water you don’t directly change how wealthy people are.

If you invest in irrigation and clean water you allow people to spend less time working just to exist. If your farming effort gives you more of a surplus you can sell that surplus and have more wealth.

What seems to get most people with these kind of statistics is the very richest of the rich have, in the most cases, just been dumb lucky.

They were either:
– Handed the money through famlial connections;
– Invested in the right thing at the right time;
– Talented enough to have exploitable creative skills (? questionalble in some cases, I know)
…. etc etc

The list could run on, I’m sure you all know what I mean. Some rich people have worked very very hard to get where they are and taken considerable risks which they have borne well.
The feeling among many of the less well off is that how hard you work isn’t related to how well you are rewarded, whether this work is physically or mentally demanding. That, and the richest seem to be supporting a systyem that keeps their great wealth within the closed circle of Rich People.

We live in a world where Mark Zuckerberg can create tens of billions of wealth from “nothing” and the population of India can grow from 350m to 1 billion in 75 years, almost all of those people desperately poor.

dumb lucky

Rooney perhaps. Gates less so. Do you remember dos?!?

Do you remember dos?!?

Was a smart move buying a quick and dirty os off that that bloke to pass to ibm and keeping the rights was smart.

The charts on a previous page show people consuming more or less than $1.90 of stuff per day.

That seems a fairly blunt way of measuring poverty. In the UK you could consume much more than that and be considered ti be living in poverty.

I’ve been poor most of my life and tbh now find it quite eye opening to have a few quid and realise how easily money goes to money.

Everyone ever (including Zuckerberg) who has made money made it at the expense of something else, whether its the air we breath, our enviroment, our data, our health, our freedom, anything thats available cheaply to all is just converted in to cash and given to a few.