Billionaires Have More Wealth Than Almost 5 Billion People Combined

Just some highlights from this report.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-2-000-billionaires-more-090047225.html

Gabrielle Olya
GOBankingRatesJuly 20, 2020

Wealth inequality is nothing new, but it’s reached staggering proportions in 2020. An Oxfam report released in January found that the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than that of 4.6 billion other people combined — meaning they are wealthier than 60% of the earth’s entire population combined.

The Oxfam report also estimated that the world’s 22 richest men have more wealth than all the women in Africa combined.

“Women and girls, who spend billions of hours cooking, cleaning, and caring for children and the elderly, are the backbone of our global economy yet benefit the least from it,” Paul O’Brien, vice president of policy and advocacy at Oxfam America, said in a release about the report. “It’s no accident that while most billionaires are men, women handle the care work and dominate the least secure and lowest-paid jobs. Women and girls are subsidizing our sexist economies, enabling rich, white, male billionaires to accumulate vast fortunes at the expense of the poorest.”

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Inequality.org analyzed Forbes’ list of the 400 wealthiest Americans and found that the people on this list have grown exponentially wealthier over time. After adjusting for inflation, the average person on the Forbes 400 list had a net worth of $600 million in 1982; in 2019, the average was $7.4 billion.

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According to data from the National Bureau of Economic Research, in 1983, the top 0.1% of Americans had an average net worth of $43.3 million, adjusted to 2016 dollars; in 2016, the top 0.1% had an average net worth of $100.8 million. Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of Americans had a net worth of $6,900 in 1983, adjusted to 2016 dollars. By 2016, the bottom 40% had an average net worth of -$8,900 — this “negative wealth” is due to debts exceeding assets.

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Three of the richest families in America — the Waltons, the Kochs and the Mars family — have seen their wealth increase nearly 6,000% since 1982, according to a 2018 report by Inequality.org. Meanwhile, the median household wealth has decreased by 3% over that same time period.

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It would take an Amazon worker earning the company’s minimum wage of $15 an hour 2.5 million years to generate Bezos’ earnings. To put that in perspective, that’s more than 10 times the length of all human existence.