Last summer, Thomas Piketty published Capital in the Twenty-First Century (reviewed here), a best-seller that probably few people waded through. One of the things Piketty explores is how capital wealth accumulates far more rapidly than wealth from wages, and tends to be concentrated in an increasingly small percentage of the global population.
This week, we got a startling glimpse of this in a new Oxfam Study that predicts that by 2016 (that is next year, folks) one percent of the world’s population will control more of the world’s wealth than the remaining ninety-nine percent of the world’s population. A mere 80 of the world’s richest individuals control more wealth than the bottom 3.5 billion people in the world.
All but the most ardent capitalists will see these figures and conclude something is wrong. When over 1 billion people live on less that $1.25 a day while 80 people have…
View original post 537 more words
Interesting repost and I read the Oxfam report as well, a little scary in its ramifications.
LikeLike