Welcome to the world’s inequality countdown. In 2010, some 388 people owned as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. Jump to 2014 and that 388 is down to 85 people. In 2015 the figure was 80 and now today Oxfam has revealed that 62 rich individuals own as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people.
If this deeply alarming inequality clock continues to tick as fast, by 2020 a mere 11 people could have the same wealth as half the world. That’s not even a dozen.
This extreme inequality is not a sign of a healthy global economy as all the wealth is being sucked up by those at the dizzying top. Trickle-down economics is a fallacy – this is not just Oxfam’s view but that of the World Bank also. The rich can no longer pretend their wealth benefits the rest of us. It doesn’t: it harms us. The only thing that’s “trickling down” is inequality, and powerlessness.
The consequences of this extreme economic inequality are far reaching. If inequality is not dealt with, we could see more social unrest across the world, a brake on growth and all the work that has been done in the last quarter century on poverty halted – potentially reversed.
Unstable unequal world
What this means to you and me is a more unstable, unequal world with fewer people able to escape poverty. The world’s most unequal region is still Latin America, despite income inequality there falling in recent years.
In 2014, the richest 10 percent of people in Latin America had amassed 71 percent of the region’s wealth. If this trend continues, according to Oxfam’s calculations, in only six years the region’s richest 1 percent will have more wealth than the 99 percent.
Meanwhile, inequality in Asia has risen by as much as 18 percent since the mid-1990s. Had this rise not happened, 240 million people across Asia could have escaped poverty.