Well, yes Mr. Sparrow, and?
Jeff Sparrow treats us to an extended whine about wealth and inequality.
The grotesque inequality embodied by Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg is a threat to democracy
Gosh.
Oxfam tells us that a mere 10 people now possess more wealth than the bottom 40% of humanity – and that the richest 20 tycoons collectively own more than the entire GDP of sub-Saharan Africa.
This is normal. For it is possible to have negative wealth - in a way that we do not record negative incomes in the associated figures - where debts are higher than assets holdings. The obvious example is the student fresh out of college who has student loan debt, a high lifetime income to look forward to but as the sheepskin is not counted as a financial asset but the debt is, well, a debt, then they have negative wealth. In fact, some of the poorest people in the world by this wealth measure are the top graduates from the top American universities and training programmes about to embark on globally top earning careers.
It is - roughly and about - true that if you’re a £10 note and no debts then you’re richer than 30% of fellow Britons. Wealthier that is. The same is true of $10 and fellow Americans.
Oh, also, comparing wealth, a stock, to GDP, a flow, is very bad number crunching.
But, you know:
Between April 2020 and April 2021, Musk reportedly made nearly US$140bn……Not so long ago, the Zuck earned an eye-watering $28,538 a minute……..A few years back, the Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi noted that, if you had earned $5,000 each and every day from 1493 onwards, you’d still have less money than Jeff Bezos – even after his divorce. The monstrous scale of global inequality renders genuine democracy a farce.
Mark Zuckerberg has shed $90 billion in 2022 while Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have both lost $58 billion as gloomy earnings reports leave tech stocks reeling
So, what happened last year has all gone into reverse this. Global wealth inequality - by this specific measure being used about the tech bro’s - is markely lower than it was last. Perhaps those 20 tycoons now own less than the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa.
OK, is democracy now better? Has that position of sub-Saharan Africa been improved as a result of this change? Are we, in fact, better off as a result of this reversal of the thing being complained about?
Not obviously, no. We’d be fascinated to find anyone at all who would be able to - heck, try to - point to anything that has got better as a result of this reversal.
So, the original complaint is not a real one, is it. It’s nobbut a whine and a mither. But then this is The Guardian on economics so how surprised should we be?