The Gilded Age of planet Earth?
By Jim Surber

I’ve always had an interest in the relativity of numbers, and in the old saying, “figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”

If Johnny mows one yard in a day for $10, can he make $70 per week if he mows every day?

If two men can build a garage in fifty hours, can fifty men build the same garage in two hours?

If a car has one mile to travel and covers the first half-mile in sixty seconds, why can it never average sixty mph for the trip no matter how fast it travels during the second half-mile?

Some situations lend themselves to flexible, mathematical relativity. Others do not, and some are rigidly controlled with no possible flexibility.

I thought of this after reading that a recent report prepared for the World Economic Forum states that eighty-five people in the world control the same amount of wealth as half the world’s population.

This would indicate that the wealth of 85 individuals is equal to that of the bottom 3.5 billion people (give or take a few, of course), or that one person controls the same wealth as over 41 million people.

The report further states that these 85 richest people control an amount of about 1.7 trillion US dollars.

Dividing $1.7 trillion by 3.5 billion people would show that each person of the hoard would have an average net worth of a little over $485. Concurrently, each of the 85 richest would have an average net worth of $20 billion.

Stated another way, the report claims that half the entire world’s wealth is now controlled by 1 percent of the world’s population, with the other half split among the remaining 99 percent. This would mean that about 70 million people are, collectively, as rich as the remaining 6.93 billion.

Was the purpose of the report to illustrate a dangerous situation or to sensationalize before a world economic meeting? It would be interesting to know how these figures have changed over time. The report declares that wealth inequality is “impacting social stability within countries and threatening security on a global scale.”

While there are many who believe that these imbalances, whether recent or long-term, are the natural order and quite justified, it does beg important questions.

Does massive concentration of economic resources in fewer hands present a threat to inclusive political and economic systems?

How much economic imbalance is too much? (Quite similar to asking, “how much debt is too much?”) Are there a significant number of people in the world who even care how big the imbalance may be?

In the US, it has been estimated that the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population received 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth between 2009 and 2012, while the bottom 90 per cent became poorer. Since 1980, this top one per cent has more than doubled their share of national income. Estimations of total wealth become difficult considering that possibly $18.5 trillion may be held unrecorded and offshore.

And if accurate, that last one is a sobering statistic in itself. If a relatively small number of wealthy US citizens have an amount of money squirreled away and shielded from taxation in offshore banks that is greater than the entire US National Debt; is the debt really that impossibly huge?

And that begs two more questions: Has weak regulation of the role of money in politics permitted wealthy individuals and corporations to exert undue influence over government policy making?

Has a skewing of public policy to favor elite interests created the greatest concentration of wealth among the richest one percent since the eve of the Great Depression?

But maybe the most privileged are already way ahead of the rest of us, and sense that the peasants with pitchforks may soon be coming. “Forbes” magazine reports outlays for home security for the ultra-rich have increased greatly over the last five years. Some are building multi-million-dollar bunkers deep underground, complete with their own geothermal power and sustainable food supplies. A wealthy family could survive in the best-planned of these luxurious strongholds for up to three generations.

Was Justice Louis Brandeis correct when he stated, “We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”? If so, what degree of concentration is too much?

We should at least remember that inequality in wealth exists before and after revolutions, although inequality in rights and opportunities are what revolutions seek to dismantle.

And that figures don’t lie, but liars will always figure.