According to Oxford University’s OUR WORLD IN DATA, there’s significantly greater income inequality in the US than in all the other G7 countries. They have much more in common with countries under authoritarian rule. Russia and India (which is arguably democratic) exceed all countries in the European Union – as does China – in terms of income inequality. What’s more, almost ALL countries seem to be getting more unequal over time. But perhaps we should stop talking about the so-called ‘one percent. It is even more revealing to talk about the zero POINT one percent. The US leads the rest of the world in terms of the share of income earned by the zero POINT one percent.
Should we be asking whether Western-style capitalism is becoming the new feudalism?
But is capitalism the problem, or is it something else?
As human populations grow, are we genetically programmed to build hierarchies like our counterparts in the insect world?
Is the zero point one percent the evolutionary equivalent of the queen bees in our human hives?
From our perspective the increasing concentration of wealth in most countries has little to enlightened self interest or Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Greed and naked self interest seem to exist regardless of a society’s political and economic structure. In two countries that have resisted the worst effects of wealth and income inequality – Norway and Singapore – something else is undoubtedly at play there. Perhaps we should figure out what Norway and Singapore are doing right!
Relate Content:
Mapping the Ownership Network of Canada’s Billionaire Families
The planet has a billionaire problem. According to Oxfam, the world’s billionaires have more combined wealth than the bottom 60% of humanity — some 4.6 billion people. Given this obscene situation, calls are growing to rid the world of the billionaire class. But how do we make that happen?
We think that part of the answer is to understand billionaire’s network of control. Many billionaires are happy to have their net worth tracked by Forbes — they treat it as an accumulation horse race.1 But what billionaires don’t like is for people to understand how they wield power. On that front, behind ever billionaire is a complicated network of corporate control — a network that is seldom made public.
We’d like to change that. In this post, we’ll map the ownership network of ten billionaire families in Canada.
Why Canada? Well, because we’re Canadian researchers. But more importantly, because the statistics arm of the Canadian government has done the heavy lifting for us. For the last decade, Statistics Canada has maintained a database on the inter-corporate ownership of Canadian corporations — a database that it bills as a “unique directory of ‘who owns what’ in Canada”.
This corporate-ownership database contains a trove of information about how the rich wield power. In this post, we’ll begin to explore the data by mapping the ownership network of the following billionaire families:
