Inequality on a Global Scale (literally)

The cartoon below is from the great editorial cartoonist Stuart Carlson. It highlights with humor a very serious global economic condition, growing wealth inequality.

http://www.gocomics.com/stuartcarlson/2014/06/20#.U9Zns_ldXfJ (Go and enjoy his other cartoons.)


Allow me to breakdown the math for you. These figures work out to an average of $486 per poor person vs. $20 billion per rich person. This is not a measure of income but a measure of wealth, or capital.

Another important math fact from this illustration: If you have $20 billion in capital and earn an average return on investments of 4% a year, and if you lavishly spend $1 million per month on your lifestyle, at the end of 50 years you will still have $140 billion left for your children to inherit. That's right, if you have seven children they would each get close to the 20 billion that you started out with.

This is the crisis of capital that we face. This fact is among the findings of economist Thomas Piketty in his recent book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Within just a few generations almost all the wealth on the planet will be handed down from parents to children. Almost no new fortunes will be made through the earnings of those who have to work for a living. We will effectively return to a feudal system even here in the United States and abroad. The phenomenon is global. The quicker national and global population stabilize or decline the faster wealth will concentrate among the wealthy.

All we have to do to return to a feudal society is... do nothing.

Someone on facebook asked me, "Is it really the zero-sum game that these breakdowns of wealth distribution always seem to imply?"  Good question! Is it the case that the growing wealth of the wealthy must come at the expense of growing poverty Or, doesn't the growth of capital lift all ships?

When you look at national and global income-to-capital averages you see what looks like fairly stable ratios. Growing capital wealth and growth in income seem to balance. But look a littler closer and you see that more of the population falls into poverty as the value of capital grows at compounded rates. So yes, there is more national income, but there is an ever larger percentage of income coming from capital investments and going to the wealthy.  As capital becomes the main source of income, the real earnings of wage earners stretches and collapses at the lower end of the economic scale.  For the middle class, it is like being caught between the gravitational fields of two black holes... one created by poverty and  the other by capital wealth