The global plutocracy, in one chart

When the tides rise, a lot of smaller ships get smashed on the rocks

We live in a world of haves and have-nots, a fact vividly illustrated by the latest report from the World Inequality Lab: as of 2021, the world’s billionaire class of 2,600 individuals own nearly twice as much of the world’s household wealth as the poorest 4 billion (yes, billion with a ‘b’) people.

The pandemic has been extremely lucrative for the world’s plutocrats, with their total wealth nearly doubling since 2019. The average billionaire now has a net worth of about 3 billion dollars. Billionaires as a class personally control $7.6 trillion in assets — more than the annual economic output of South America and Africa combined.

Several hundred now boast fortunes north of $10 billion. And nine of them — including American mega-billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk — have a net worth in excess of $100 billion, more than the annual economic output of some of the smaller U.S. states.

The Lab, a project of some of the world’s leading experts on inequality, finds that the fortunes of the poorest half of the world — approximately 4 billion people — are basically unchanged, hovering around 2 percent of global household wealth since the late 1990s.

There is some good news in the report. In raw-dollar terms wealth has increased since the 1990s even for the poorest. The average member of the bottom 50 percent has seen his net worth rise from about $1,000 to $3,000. But these changes amount to mere scraps in comparison to what’s happening at the top of the global wealth distribution: while the bottom 50 percent captured about 2 percent of all wealth growth since 1995, the top 1 percent alone raked in 38% of newly-generated riches.

These, of course, are global averages. The picture within individual countries, communities and households can be much different. In the United States, for instance, families in the lower third of the wealth distribution — representing roughly 110 million people — have no wealth to speak of at all. Roughly 1 in 5 households, meanwhile, have a negative net worth — their debts are greater than their assets, and are in all likelihood owed, in the end, to the millionaires and billionaires at the top of the heap.

Defenders of the status quo are fond of saying that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that will the rich have indeed become richer living standards have also gone up for everyone else. But it’s hard to square that notion with the dire situation, here in the U.S. at least, of the poorest among us. Those having trouble affording housing (7 million families), or food (13 million families), or having to delay medical care due to cost (one quarter of adults). The tides lifting billionaire yachts are also smashing a lot of smaller vessels on the rocks.