Power and Property

It is a question of income. The increase in the global inequality of income distribution has to do with the global distribution of property and property rights. At present the richest 1% of the world’s population has income equal to that of the bottom 57%, in other words, ca. 50 million wealthy people have the same amount of money at their disposal as 2.7 billion poor. The top 10% of the U.S. population [25 million] has an aggregate income equal to that of the 43% poorest people in the world [2 billion]. And the situation is getting worse: whereas the richest 10% of the world’s population had an income that was seventy-nine times higher than that of the poorest 10% in 1980, in 2000 their income was 120 times higher. Taking the world as a whole, the gap between the richest fifth and the poorest fifth of the world’s population has doubled in the past decades. There are also major differences between individual nation-states. The gap between the poor and the rich in the USA is more than double that in Germany, and in Brazil it is six times greater than that in Germany.