people are talking a lot about inequality these days about the fact
that the richest 1% have so much more than everybody else but most of the
focus seems to be on the United States and it strikes me that the same story
needs to be told about global and calling - so i did some research and
this is what i found from reliable sources like the UN it turns out that
while the u.s. is totally out of whack
things are actually way worse for the planet as a whole
let's start with this graph a perfectly even distribution of wealth among all
living people with everyone divided into 5 equal groups
now let's show how much each group actually has a shocking right
eighty percent of the world's people barely have any wealth
it's hard to even see them on the charts meanwhile the richest two percent
they have more wealth than the rest of the world
let's look at this chart another way let's take the whole world's population
all seven billion of us and reduce it to just a representative 100 joules
here they are poorest people on the Left richest people on the right now let's
show how the world's total wealth roughly 220 three trillion dollars is
distributed the vast majority have practically nothing nothing with which
to educate their children
nothing with which to pay for basic medicines well the richest 1% they've
accumulated forty-three percent of our world wealth the bottom eighty percent
meanwhile that's eight out of every 10 people have just six percent between
them but even this doesn't really show how extreme things have become the
richest 300 people on earth have the same wealth as the poorest three billion
so the number of people it takes to fill a mid-sized commercial aircraft have
more wealth and the populations of India China the US and Brazil combines we can
also see this difference geographically with a huge and growing gap between a
few rich places versus the majority of the world for most of history
things were much more equal to hundred years ago rich countries were only three
times richer than poor countries by the end of colonialism in the nineteen
sixties they were 35 times richer today there are about 80 times richer rich
countries try to compensate for this by giving aid to poor countries about a
hundred and thirty billion dollars each year
that's a lot of money so then why does the wealth gap keep getting bigger one
reason i found is that large corporations are taking more than 900
billion dollars out of poor countries each year through a form of tax
avoidance called trade mispricing
on top of this each year poor countries are paying about six hundred billion
dollars in debt service to rich countries on loans that have already
been paid off many times over
and then there's the money that poor countries lose from trade rules imposed
by rich countries to get access to more resources and cheaper labor economist
from the University of Massachusetts calculate that this cost for countries
about five hundred billion dollars a year
all together that's more than two trillion dollars that flows from some of
the poorest parts of the world to the richest every year which governments
like to say they're helping poor countries develop but who is developing
who here
this makes me think that there's something wrong with the basic rules of
the global economy
it can't be okay that the wealth of our planet is becoming so concentrated in
the hands of such a tiny number of people
the only reasonable response it seems to me and our only hope is to change the
rules
yeah