Posts Tagged ‘ Wealth ’

The One Percent-ers

This is a guest post from Michael Doorly, Concern Worldwide’s head of active citizenship.

Can you name the wealthiest person in the world, or how about five of the top twenty? Chances are you probably can. Yes Bill Gates is there (but he is only the second wealthiest), Warren Buffet is there as is the founder of Walmart (Jim Walton) and Liliane Bettencourt (founder of L’Oreal) and so is everyone’s favourite social networker, Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook).

The lives of the rich and famous it seems have always been and will continue to be, a fascination for us.  We can still see ‘Dallas’ re-runs on TV along with more modern fare like ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’, ‘Divas and Daughters’, ‘The Hills’, MTV Cribs and even Downton Abbey…wealth it must be said is sooo much more attractive than poverty.

We have heard the numbers before:  that 2% of the world’s wealthiest people control 50% of the world’s wealth, that 2.8 billion people live on less than $2 a day or that 80% of the world’s population live on less than $10 a day…they are numbers that sometimes shock and anger but sadly don’t really change very much from year to year.

Anyway what got me started on this blog is an article in the Jan 14th, 2012 New York Times entitled; Among the Wealthiest One Percent, Many Variations. It is an interesting read about the makeup of America’s super wealthy. Here’s a quote;

As a member of the 1 percent, he is part of a club whose name conjures images of Wall Street bosses who are chauffeured from manse to Manhattan and fat cats who have armies of lobbyists at the ready…But in reality is a far more varied group one that includes podiatrists and actuaries, executives and entrepreneurs, the self- made and the silver spoon set.

The top 1 percent of earners in a given year receives just under a fifth of the country’s pretax income, about double their share 30 years ago…

Interested in the occupations and industries of America’s wealthiest households by percentage or actual figures? The New York Times has it covered.

I wonder what I’ll watch on TV tonight?

The poor continue to give and the rich continue to receive – the case of Item 18(b)

In a world of obscene inequality we like to think things are getting better and, in some areas, things are indeed improving – literacy, girl’s education, vaccines, ARVs etc. But when it comes to the basics – power and money, same old, same old – the poor lose, the rich win.

Tucked away in the kind of report only insomniac development fundamentalists would read we find what at first sight appears to be a misprint. A report by the Secretary General of the UN to the General Assembly at its 65th session on July 30th, 2010 (‘Item 18(b) )’ of the provisional agenda, Macroeconomic Policy Questions) entitled International Financial System and Development notes that developing countries as a group continued to provide net financial resources to developed countries in 2009, amounting to $US513 billion! Surely this could not be true – the Poor World transferred $US513 billion to the Rich World? In one year? Alas, it was not a typo but a statement of fact.

Without a trace of irony, the report went on to note:

‘…while still substantial, this amount is notably lower than the record high of $883 billion reached in 2008… The decrease reflects the transitory narrowing of global imbalances as a consequence of the global economic and financial crisis. The structure of flows underlying the reversal of the increase in financial transfers in 2009 indicates, for the most part, a disorderly unwinding of accumulated global imbalances.’

However, in case anyone gets jumpy at the downturn, the Secretary General’s Report went on to note that such ‘transfers’ were expected to revert to previous levels with an ‘…expected increase in outward resource transfer from developing countries in 2010’. The estimated figure for 2010 was $US641.2 billion.

The even more interesting Annex to the Report calculated the yearly net transfer to developed economies from developing economies from 1998 to 2010 (estimate) which amounted to a staggering $US5740.6 billion.

And we wonder why the poor stay poor!

See: http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/65/189&Lang=E
The 2011 report (66th session, Item 17(b) of the provisional agenda) is now also available and makes equally astonishing reading

See: http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/65/189&Lang=E


Note: these, and similar issues, will be further reviewed and debated in the forthcoming 6th edition of 80:20 Development in an Unequal World, scheduled for publication in March 2012 by 80:20 Educating and Acting for a Better World and the University of South Africa Press.