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the great wealth gap .....

the great wealth gap .....

The top one percent of the wealthiest people on the planet own nearly fifty percent of the world's assets while the bottom fifty percent of the global population combined own less than one percent of the world's wealth.

Those are the findings of an annual report by the investment firm Credit Suisse released Tuesday - the 2014 Global Wealth Report (pdf) - which shows that global economic inequality has surged since the financial collapse of 2008.

According to the report, "global wealth has grown to a new record, rising by $20.1 trillion between mid-2013 and mid-2014, an increase of 8.3%, to reach $263 trillion – more than twice the $117 trillion recorded for the year 2000."

Though the rate of this wealth creation has been particularly fast over the last year—the fastest annual growth recorded since the pre-crisis year of 2007 - the report notes that the benefits of this overall growth have flowed disproportionately to the already wealthy. And the report reveals that as of mid-2014, "the bottom half of the global population own less than 1% of total wealth. In sharp contrast, the richest decile hold 87% of the world’s wealth, and the top percentile alone account for 48.2% of global assets.”

Campaigners at Oxfam International, which earlier this put out their own report on global inequality (pdf), said the Credit Suisse report, though generally serving separate aims, confirms what they also found in terms of global inequality.

“These figures give more evidence that inequality is extreme and growing, and that economic recovery following the financial crisis has been skewed in favour of the wealthiest. In poor countries, rising inequality means the difference between children getting the chance to go to school and sick people getting life-saving medicines,” Oxfam’s head of inequality Emma Seery told the Guardian in response to the latest study.

In addition to giving an overall view of trends in global wealth, the authors of the Credit Suisse gave special attention to the issue of inequality in this year's report, noting the increasing level of concern surrounding the topic. "The changing distribution of wealth is now one of the most widely discussed and controversial of topics," they write, "Not least owing to [French economist] Thomas Piketty’s recent account of long-term trends around inequality. We are confident that the depth of our data will make a valuable contribution to the inequality debate."

According to the report:

In almost all countries, the mean wealth of the top decile (i.e. the wealthiest 10% of adults) is more than ten times median wealth. For the top percentile (i.e. the wealthiest 1% of adults), mean wealth exceeds 100 times the median wealth in many countries and can approach 1000 times the median in the most unequal nations. This has been the case throughout most of human history, with wealth ownership often equating with land holdings, and wealth more often acquired via inheritance or conquest rather than talent or hard work. However, a combination of factors caused wealth inequality to trend downwards in high income countries during much of the 20th century, suggesting that a new era had emerged. That downward trend now appears to have stalled, and possibly gone into reverse.

The Top 1% Own Half The World's Assets

 

wealth trickle down is a total bullshit concept...

from Victoria Rollison

When will progressives learn to speak to people? Not at people. Speak to people. A great example of the wishy washy language that the left uses to try to convince people of the merits of their ideas is contained in this article about wealth inequality by Richard Denniss. Denniss wrote this fantastic piece in response to Amanda Vanstone’s whine about the poor-rich-people getting picked on which conveniently forgot to mention that wealth doesn’t trickle down and was therefore total bullshit. Denniss clearly knows his stuff. If you’ve not heard of him, you can read all about him and his progressive think tank, the Australia Institute in the Saturday Paper. So you’ll notice I did just say that Denniss’ piece was fantastic, but I also called it wishy washy. Contradictory yes, but keep up because what is fantastic to the left can be completely wasted on those who don’t share the left’s values. And this is what I’m talking about when I say progressives need to learn to speak to people in a way that will actually convince them to think differently about something they thought they had firm views on. Like ideological positions towards wealth inequality. For instance.

Before you go and say ‘who does this nobody blogger think she is telling a certified expert think tanker (do they actually think inside tanks?) how to communicate’, let me preface my argument by explaining that I don’t have all the answers. I don’t even have many of them. Because I too can’t understand for the life of me why anyone would have voted for Tony Abbott, and every time I get into a conversation with one of them I have to take a deep breath and walk quickly away before I lose my temper. But we need to remind ourselves that we can’t understand why anyone would vote for Abbott because we don’t think like Abbott voters. And it’s not until we work out how they think that we can possibly even begin to think about how we speak to them. Not in a weird ‘let’s hypnotise or brainwash Abbott voters to convince them never to do that again’, (although if anyone has any thoughts on this I’d be happy to hear them). But what I’m saying is that progressives need to learn how non-progressives understand the world before we can explain why progressive policies are in everyone’s best interests. Because we do believe that don’t we?

A perfect example of this is Denniss’s very logical argument about wealth equality, or fairness, being good for all of us. This is 100% true, and I’ve written before about how this concept should be adopted by the Labor Party as the overarching narrative to define their policy purpose. When I read an article about the ill-effects of wealth inequality for all of us, rich and poor alike, I nod my head and in total agreement I say ‘well that’s sorted, we need to ensure there is wealth equality, done, let’s move on’. But I would say that wouldn’t I. And so would most other people who share my values and are likely to agree with Denniss’s article. So he’s preaching to the converted. But what about non-progressives and those who don’t sit firmly in either camp? These are the people we need to think hard about and work out what they see when they read such an article. Words like ‘fairness’ and ‘equity’ are littered throughout progressive communications, and of course they are feel-good words for people who value fairness and equity inherently. But what about those who believe in the merits of a free market above all else, who when a left-winger says ‘fairness’, hear ‘you’re trying to take away money I’ve earned to give to someone who hasn’t earned it, which is not fair’. It’s the same word, but the meaning behind it, and what is understood when it is heard is completely different for people with different values.

Read more: http://victoriarollison.com/2014/10/15/speak-to-abbott-voters/

worst thing in terms of fiscal rectitude...

David Stockman was Ronald Reagan's budget director in the 1980s. He was the architect of the president's "trickle down theory," but now believes that US fiscal policy has gone off the rails. “The Republican concept of starving the beast is the worst thing in terms of fiscal rectitude that you can imagine,” Stockman says today. “It’s even worse than the Keynesian models of the Democrats.”

READ MORE: http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/photo-gallery-the-deline-of-capitalism-fotostrecke-120316-5.html