Year End Report On Global Inequality

[Jcrowley]

Deeply Unequal World

Sam Pizzigati | December 20, 2006

Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco, IPS

Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

Some people, at year's end, like to spread holiday cheer. The world might do better, suggests a landmark new report  from the United Nations University in Helsinki, to start spreading wealth. The new study--the first ever to tally, for the entire world, all the major elements of household wealth, everything from financial assets and debts to land, homes, and other tangible property--finds some $125.3 trillion worth of wealth about in the world, as of the year 2000.

If that wealth were divided in perfectly equal shares among all the world’s 3.7 billion adults, every adult on Earth would hold a net worth of just under $34,000 in U.S. dollars, according to The World Distribution of Household Wealth report.

Most Wealth in Few Pockets

In real life, says this new report, released by the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research, half the world’s adults hold under one-tenth that modest sum, less than $2,161. The vast bulk of the world’s wealth, the study observes, sits “highly concentrated” in the pockets of a relative few. How concentrated? The richest 5 percent of the world’s adults--minimum net worth, $150,145--hold 70.6 percent of the world’s wealth. The richest 1 percent--minimum wealth, $514,512--hold 39.9 percent of the world's wealth all by themselves, 13,000 times more than the entire bottom 10 percent.

<snip>

Super-Rich Not Counted

How accurately do all these global numbers reflect the actual distribution of the world’s household wealth? If anything, notes the UN University study authors, their report understates just how unequal the world’s wealth distribution has become. Their base survey data, they explain, “do not reflect the holdings of the super-rich.”

<snip>

Governing for the Elite

Governments that reflect these extreme inequalities in power, the World Bank economist added, tend to govern not in the public interest, but in the interest of wealthy elites.

<snip>

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3819

[Sapphire Blue]

1. K&R

:kick:

[bobbolink]

2. "tend to govern not in the public interest, but in the interest of wealthy elites."

I wonder what it would take for this to become the new common knowledge?

Preach it, Jcrowley!

Thanks! :hi:

[rman]

3. WB economists who critisize the effects of WB policy

tend not to remain employed by the WB for very long.

"We tried to help Bolivia, it went under. We tried to help Brazil, it exploded. We tried to help Indonesia, it was burning in riots. Maybe there's a pattern here.
Our systems for eliminating barriers, eliminating unions, cause pain, but not pain that leads to gain, it's pain that leads to collapse, failure and economic death."
- Joe Stiglitz, former Chief Economist for the World Bank

For suggesting, simply suggesting that they reevaluate their positions, the World Bank fired him. He wasn't even allowed to resign, he was banished from the entire World Bank.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=128&row=1


It's very interesting that some of the good guys in high positions within the system are increasingly able to make such noise about what's wrong with the system.

[Selatius]

4. If the wealth gap in the US was as extreme as it is in the world, there would be a bloody revolution

If you were a worker living in a country where the top 5 percent own 70 percent of the nation's wealth, the chances are likely you would not be among the 5 percent, which means you're either in the minority middle class or the majority poor. Between the latter two, the chances are far higher you would be among the poor, not the middle class. For you, daily existence, like it is for billions of people in the world, would be characterized by brutal, bone-crushing poverty and the struggle for money just to afford food and housing.

How's it feel to be a slave to your plantation master?