On Wealth Inequality

Cover Photo by Mykhailo Volkov

Global

Findings from the 2022 World Inequality Report, indicate the top 10% of the planet’s richest individuals own 76% of the world’s wealth, while the bottom 50% of the global population possesses just 2% of the total wealth.

‘How corporate power divides our world and the need for a new era of public action’ from the Oxfam International Jan 2024 Inequality Inc. Report demonstrates the link between extreme wealth and corporate power, and the ‘four ways that corporate power fuels inequality:

1. Rewarding the wealthy, not workers
2. Dodging taxes
3. Privatising public services
4. Driving climate breakdown.’

This report shows the link between extreme wealth and corporate power:

The wealth of the world’s five richest billionaires has more than doubled
since the start of this decade, while 60% of humanity (5 billion) has grown poorer.

Oxfam International further warns:

As we enter 2024, the very real danger is that these extraordinary extremes
are becoming the new normal. Corporate and monopoly power, as this paper
shows, is an unrelenting inequality-generating machine.

Executive Summary, pp 8–14

Australia

Wealth inequality has increased in Australia as elsewhere in the world, and the yawning wealth gap between Australia’s richest few and the poorest many is at its highest level for 74 years. As the Australia Institute recorded in April 2023, the distribution of economic growth in Australia has generated inequality on steroids.

You can read their full report here.

As appallingly, the wealth of Australia’s 47 billionaires doubled to $255 billion at a rate of $2376 per second or more than $205 million per day during the first two years of the pandemic, according to Kate Forbes, 7 February 2022.

You can read her full article here.

This means that Australia has more new billionaires since the pandemic was declared, they also ‘hold more wealth than the poorest 30% (or 7.7 million) of Australia’s population’ says Michael Yardney, 3 January 2022.

You can read his full article here.

Oxfam’s research demonstrates that corporate power is driving inequality:

We are living in a new era of monopoly corporate power. A small number of corporations continue to get bigger and bigger, wielding extraordinary influence over economies, governments and the lives of workers and people trying to get by in times of crisis. These corporations are often making super profits, which mostly deliver financial benefits to wealthy shareholders, including their billionaire majority shareholders or owners.