Now That's A Gap

While we are all being whirled around by the emotional crosscurrents of spending money to show love, here are a few statistics to ponder: according to the study released by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the UN University, half of the wealth in all the world is in the possession of 2% of the world's people.

Ten percent of the world's population own 85% of the world's wealth.

If you are an adult worth more than $2200, congratulations: you are in the top 50%. If you're worth half a million, you're in the elite 1%.

That second set of statistics may be pretty meaningless in ordinary life, but the first set is not. The gap between rich and poor has been growing for a generation, and one of the countries with the greatest income inequality in the world is the USA.

This means something. The poor in the world, particularly in poor countries, are consigned to poverty for generations, because they don't have the means to break into the higher brackets--there's no money for education, mobility, investment, starting over.

In America, it's more complicated, yet maybe not so much: how does a democracy function, with a few plutocrats and a lot of losers? We could go on for awhile discussing the ramifications on political as well as personal psychologies. There are dark arguments about how income equality is bad for the economy--some of which are beginning to be confronted.

We've known for half a century that there is more than enough wealth to make everyone reasonably wealthy. Even in the past year, it's been demonstrated how painlessly most of the poverty in the world could be eradicated in a few years. Back in the 1960s, economists worried about what people would do with all their leisure time in the 21st century, because so little time would be required to make a sumptuous living. There were also quite serious proposals for a Guaranteed National Income, which would solve all kinds of social problems, while increasing national wealth in the long term.

But we're leaner and meaner now. That is, the plutocrats and the oligarchs are meaner, and most of the world's people are leaner. (Except, in an irony that Kafka and Kierkegaard might mordantly savor, in America it's the rich who are physically lean. As for the rest, let them eat fatburgers.)