Wealth Inequality Update

Wealth inequality continues. Now, 0.7% of the people control 46% of the wealth. That wealth continues to be concentrated in a few European and North American cities. China is generating millionaires rapidly, but their total wealth hasn’t caught up to the billionaires outside China. It can be hard to imagine such numbers but it is simple arithmetic. It takes a thousand millionaires to equal the wealth of one billionaire, and many billionaires are now worth tens of hundreds of billions. It takes money to make money, and the people with the most can make the most. In the meantime, the people with the least, those with net worth less than $10,000, 70% of the world’s population, only control 2.7% of the wealth. It takes at least 100 such people to equal the wealth of one millionaire, and 100,000 to equal the wealth of one billionaire. Currently, the richest person in the world is worth roughly 100,000,000,000, equivalent to 10,000,000 ten-thousandaires, a number larger than the populations of most countries.

“These Charts Show The Extreme Concentration Of Global Wealth” – World Economic Forum