In the run-up to Davos, the headlines have been about 1% of the world’s population owning half the world’s wealth. (The Wealth “bible” is the Credit Suisse Wealth Report). The richest 80 people (0.1% of the 1%) have more wealth than the poorest half of the world’s population. Obama is talking about an additional tax on the wealthy. In his State of the Union address yesterday he declared that the economic crisis was over and about “spreading the wealth”. He prioritised the working families and the “middle class”. In Davos, 2,500 delegates arrived in 1,700 private jets.
Most people on the left of the political divide want more to be taken from the rich to be “given” to the poor. The Robin Hood syndrome. Note that when the intention is to “give to the poor” and not for “making the poor greater creators of wealth”, the driving force is mainly envy. It is when the desire to deprive the rich is more important than any desire to improve the lot of the poor. Concern is over-ridden by envy. Sometimes it seems to me that the real difference between left and right is that the left wants to spread the consumption of existing wealth (and hope that total wealth increases), while the right want to focus on creating wealth (and hope that it trickles down and gets equitably distributed).
But there is a fundamental fallacy in the view that the poor are poor because the rich are rich. There may well be some of the rich who are exploiting some of the poor and where the poor are not getting a just opportunity to be creators of wealth. There may well be members of the rich who create no wealth but remain rich because of inherited wealth. But by far the greatest majority of the rich are rich because they created more wealth than others. The real question is whether each individual gets an equitable opportunity to create wealth and then gets to retain an equitable portion of the wealth he has created. (It is a different matter but I still do not understand why it is the creation and the retention of wealth that attracts more penalties in the form of taxation than the destruction or consumption of wealth).
What constitutes wealth is a different matter, but no matter what definition is used, wealth is not something static. The “wealth of the world” is always changing. It is constantly being created and consumed and destroyed. The key point is not how much the rich have but whether the “poor” are increasing their creation of and their stock of wealth.
And the simple fact is that the “poorer half” of the world has been steadily increasing its wealth creation and its wealth retention. Between 2000 and 2014 the total stock of “wealth” in the world increased by over 250%!
Wealth Report Figure 1 Credit Suisse
It is during periods of growth that inequality reduces and this is very striking when comparing the 2000-2007 period with the 2007-2014 period.
Inequality trends for individual countries are explored in more detail in Table 2, with countries listed in order of the increase in inequality since 2000. The most striking feature is the contrast in experience before and after the financial crisis. In the period from 2000 to 2007, 12 countries saw a rise in inequality while 34 recorded a reduction. Between 2007 and 2014, the overall pattern reversed: wealth inequality rose in 35 countries and fell in only 11. The reason for this abrupt change is not well understood, but it is likely to be linked to the downward trend in the share of financial assets in the early years of this century, and the strong recovery in financial assets since 2007.
The “poor” have to leave the ranks of the poor. They are not poor because the rich are rich – but because they do not have the opportunities to create and retain wealth. And that will only come in growing economies and not by increasing public expenditure where the emphasis is on consuming existing wealth rather than creating new wealth.
Tags: Davos, wealth, wealth creation, wealth inequality
The k2p blog 
February 16, 2015 at 10:19 am
[…] to create a populist wave out of such resentment and envy. (Of course they conveniently forget that the poor are not poor because the rich are rich. Most are poor because they do not, or do not have the opportunity to, create […]