Luxury yachts, The Pearl, Doha. Demotix/Tom Morgan. All rights reserved.A recurring theme in these columns for the past fourteen years has been the steadily widening wealth-poverty divide whose leading dimension is now less a rich-country-vs-poor country one than that of a transnational elite presiding over a relatively sidelined majority.
This analysis itself must keep pace with the speed of change. Even a decade and more ago, the notion of a 'double elite' was useful. A fifth of the world’s population was drawing away from the remaining four-fifths, whether in terms of income or wealth; in both cases the rich minority had at a minimum an 80%-plus share. Beyond that, the core elite of perhaps 1% of the world’s people seemed to be accreting huge wealth at a remarkable rate.
The data now reported by Oxfam in Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More (January 2016) confirms the salience of this distinction, yet also – and much more importantly – highlights the rapidity with which the divide is widening, especially among that super-elite. The richest 1% (about 72 million people) are as wealthy as the other 99%; just 62 billionaires control as much wealth as half of the world’s people. In both of these areas, the divide has expanded at an accelerating rate while the poorest people get poorer still.
