We have another study insisting that wealth inequality will be the death of us all — waifs will starve in gutters as the plutocrats polish their top hats. This study comes from the Institute for Policy Studies and is called “Billionaire Bonanza.” The problem here is that they use numbers, and yet never manage to put them into any form of perspective. It might be helpful to, you know, carry on to the point of telling us what this might all mean?
The big finding is that the top three Americans (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett) have more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined. Hmm, OK, yes, it’s true in one sense, but not in the ones that are important. This is just the way that wealth distributions work, how they’ve always worked. Wealth is always more unequally distributed than incomes. Here, for example, is a listing of the Gini (a measure of inequality, 1 means one person has everything, 0 means total equality) for wealth in different countries. That for the US is high, yes, at 0.801. The Gini for Sweden is a little lower, at 0.742, for Switzerland higher at 0.803, and Denmark is higher still at 0.808 despite being thoroughly socially democratic. Note that Denmark’s income inequality is lower than in the US, but wealth inequality is higher – these things can and do move in opposite directions at times.
