World Inequality Report 2022

This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work with another wolf response. This time I’m responding to something called the World Inequality Report of 2022. It is a regular report issued by the group known for two of its researchers Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. But a group that has grown much larger, for which I am grateful, and this report has four names attached to it. The two I mentioned, plus Lucas Chancel and Gabrielle Zucman. if you’re at all interested in the latest up-to-date detailed statistics on the inequalities of income and wealth around the world between countries, inside countries and so on this is the report you need to get. It was released on December 7^th  2021, it is available on the internet. It is worth the perusal of anyone interested in these numbers. I’m one of those and I want to share my response with all of you.

Okay, let’s begin with the key point of it all. The capitalist system that we are living under, replaced other earlier systems, feudalism in some cases, slavery in some cases, individual self-employment in still other cases, and so, on but over the last 300-350 years capitalism moved from its origins, in what we now refer to as Great Britain, spreading from there to north America, Western Europe and eventually the whole world, that is the arrangement of production, so that a small group of people called employers make all the key production decisions and dictate what to do, to the vast majority called employees whose only real freedom consists in quitting one employer and going to work for another. Under these circumstances the spread of capitalism from Britain to the whole rest of the world, a process that took three centuries has produced some clear identifiable results and one of them is summarized by the World Inequality Report for 2022.

We live in an extraordinarily unequal society. If the phrase capitalism delivers is to have any substance then one of the things it delivers, and oh does it deliver, is inequality. One of the virtues of this report is to show that over the last two or three centuries the spread of capitalism across the world usually through the medium of colonialism and imperialism has brought stunning worsening of inequalities that existed before, but that capitalism has made worse. Let me give you just a couple of the data, the statistics that you will find useful in this report. The bottom 50 percent of the people of this planet have little or no income and even less wealth. The numbers are truly stunning. Let’s start with income. The flow of money of wealth that you get on an annual basis flowing into your hands, the poorest 50 percent got in 2021 the last year we have records of, under 10. So, let’s be clear. Half of the people of this planet got to share about eight and a half percent of all the income there was to be. Had in contrast, the richest ten percent were able to get into their hands 52 percent of the total income, the middle 40 percent, that is they earn more than the bottom half but less than the top 10 percent, that 40 got about 40 of the income what you might say they were entitled to being 40 of the people they got 40 of the income but on either side of them, wow, 50 of the people shared eight and a half percent of the income. 10 of the people took in 52 of the income and it only gets worse when we look not at the flow of income into people each year, but the wealth they’ve accumulated, not how much they earn, how much they own, and here we go the bottom half of our planet together owns 2 of the wealth. Let me do that again 50 of us own 2 of the wealth the middle doesn’t own much so we have to jump to the top the top 10 own, get ready, 76 of the world’s wealth. Okay I could go on, but I don’t need to, neither do you, we have established that capitalism is a system that produces, sustains, and protects colossal inequality of income and wealth, and now I’m briefly going to list what some of the consequences are of inequalities of income and wealth of that magnitude.