The Top 1% Is Close to Owning Most of Everything
If current trends continue—and there is no reason to suspect they won't—we may be just a year away from a time when the wealthiest 1% of people in the world control the majority of the wealth.
Oxfam has released a new report on the dispiriting accumulation of more and more of the world's wealth in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of outrageously wealthy individuals. You may recall that in 2013, the bottom 50% of people on earth—about 3.5 billion people—had only 1% of global wealth. Here is a stark indication of just how fast the very rich are getting richer: " In 2010, it took 388 billionaires to equal the wealth of the bottom half of the world‟s population; by 2014, the figure had fallen to just 80 billionaires."
Eighty people have as much wealth as three and a half billion people. If you do not view this as an alarming threat to peaceful civilization on earth, you are either a fool or a billionaire. Furthermore, Oxfam says that the share of global wealth held by the richest 1% currently stands at 48%, and should cross the 50% mark by 2016. At that point, we can make it official: it is the top 1%'s world. The next 49% of us are just living in it. The bottom 50% of us are just dying (pretty soon, of preventable causes, without leaving an inheritance).
