Oxfam’s latest report exposes and estimates the extent to which the world’s wealth is becoming ever more concentrated. I draw below on Larry Elliott’s summary (Guardian 21 Jan 2019).
The figures are truly astounding, even allowing for a public sense of data-fatigue around the assets of the super-rich. The 26 richest billionaires now own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world’s population (down from 61 in 2016, and 43 in 2017). Let that sink in if you can.
2018 saw the rich becoming richer, the poor poorer. The wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe increased by $900 billion (that’s $2.5 billion a day). The increase in the wealth of the very richest was 12%, the fall in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population 11%.
The world’s richest individual is Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon. His fortune has increased to $12 billion. As Oxfam, notes, just 1% of his fortune is equivalent to the whole health budget for Ethiopia, a country of 105 million citizens.
As far as Britain is concerned, the poorest 10% of British are paying a higher effective tax rate than the richest 10% (49% compared with 34%) once taxes on consumption such as VAT are taken into account.
Theresa May may be correct when she endlessly parrots in the House of Commons that absolute poverty – where sustaining life is problematic! – continues to fall. But it is relative poverty – referring to being able to participate in society, if minimally – that should and must be the telling criterion in the fifth or sixth most affluent society in the world, and relative poverty is on the up. The other staple in May’s Commons rhetoric is that unemployment is going down; what this disguises is: (a) that people are being pushed by welfare cuts into crap non-jobs, many on zero-hours contracts, and thus into relative poverty; and (b) that one hour’s work in two weeks, and apparently even unpaid family work, count as being employed. But I diverge.
Back to the super-rich. In a previous blog on the Sunday Times Rich List, 2018, I made the following points:
- the rich and super-rich may be more heterogeneous than hitherto (see Aaron Davis’ research), though the reliance on inherited capital doubtless remains key;
- a high proportion of the rich and super-rich, well under 1% of the population and above all comprising those I have referred to as transnational or ‘nomadic’ ‘capital monopolists’, exercise a typically decisive influence over the power elites of nation states and the latter’s policy decisions;
- these capital monopolists and their allies are the principal agents of a rapidly accelerating growth in wealth and income inequality;
- the ‘British Dream’ – namely, that talent and hard work reap their rewards – is, like its older cousin in the USA, a myth that amounts to a kind of symbolic violence’ against ‘the many’;
- the global ideology of neoliberalism affords protective cover for capital monopolists and their allies and co-optees.
I want to append here a brief note on my ‘greedy bastards hypothesis’ (GBH) and its insinuation of culpability. The GBH asserts that material, social and – largely in their wake – health inequalities are a mix of intended and unintended consequence of the behaviour of capital monopolists and their allies within and without the capital executive. This is because the policies the ‘very few’ purchase from national governments lead directly to a series of social changes – via the political option of austerity – that serve to strangle those asset flows crucial for good health and longevity in those already disadvantaged.
Colleagues have occasionally pointed out that reference to the GBH weakens my argument that this is fundamentally about enduring social structures rather than morally corrupt or evil individuals. I can understand this reservation. It is indeed the casual salience of social structures, most notably social class, that I wanted and want to emphasize.
But there is in my view an issue of culpability too, and it would be wrong to shirk it. Shaming and blaming both take power to enact effectively. I have used the idea of ‘weaponising stigma’ to denote the calculated adding of blame to shame on the part of the state against the disadvantaged and otherwise vulnerable, thereby facilitating their neglect or sanctioning (eg wage freezes and welfare cuts via the introduction of Universal Credit). Neither shame nor blame can be made to stick against the likes of capital monopolists, whose power far exceeds that of critics representing ‘the many’.
Of course members of the capitalist executive in general, and the capital monopolists in particular, do not exhaust the referents of the term ‘greedy bastards’, far from it. Yet their qualifications for inclusion in this category are in some respects exceptional. How is this? Two criteria would seem to me to be decisive. They both imply an unavoidable reflexivity. Looking the other way and rationalisations don’t cut it. First, the use to which extreme forms of capital ownership are put (eg the use of tax havens, exploitative rentier activity, ‘casino capitalist’ bet-placing, donorship to pro-neoliberal political parties and the investment of ‘dark money’ in non-transparent right-wing thinktanks). Second, the conspicuous co-existence of the enhanced and politically willful disadvantaging and suffering of ‘the many’.
So, it is social structures, especially those of social class, which have not only survived but bitten even deeper into people’s lives on the demise of industrial, ‘Fordist’ capitalism, that are of paramount sociological import. BUT this is NOT to excuse that very small ‘few’ of ‘the few’ whose excrutiating personal and familial indulgencies are an insult to ‘the many’. We are indeed plagued by individually identifiable ‘greedy bastards’. Moreover the day when they can be effectively named, shamed, blamed and held to account may not be that far off. Before or by 2050 some sociologists argue.
Oxfam’s latest report exposes and estimates the extent to which the world’s wealth is becoming ever more concentrated. I draw below on Larry Elliott’s summary (Guardian 21 Jan 2019).
The figures are truly astounding, even allowing for a public sense of data-fatigue around the assets of the super-rich. The 26 richest billionaires now own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world’s population (down from 61 in 2016, and 43 in 2017). Let that sink in if you can.
2018 saw the rich becoming richer, the poor poorer. The wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe increased by $900 billion (that’s $2.5 billion a day). The increase in the wealth of the very richest was 12%, the fall in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population 11%.
The world’s richest individual is Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon. His fortune has increased to $12 billion. As Oxfam, notes, just 1% of his fortune is equivalent to the whole health budget for Ethiopia, a country of 105 million citizens.
As far as Britain is concerned, the poorest 10% of British are paying a higher effective tax rate than the richest 10% (49% compared with 34%) once taxes on consumption such as VAT are taken into account.
Theresa May may be correct when she endlessly parrots in the House of Commons that absolute poverty – where sustaining life is problematic! – continues to fall. But it is relative poverty – referring to being able to participate in society, if minimally – that should and must be the telling criterion in the fifth or sixth most affluent society in the world, and relative poverty is on the up. The other staple in May’s Commons rhetoric is that unemployment is going down; what this disguises is: (a) that people are being pushed by welfare cuts into crap non-jobs, many on zero-hours contracts, and thus into relative poverty; and (b) that one hour’s work in two weeks, and apparently even unpaid family work, count as being employed. But I diverge.
Back to the super-rich. In a previous blog on the Sunday Times Rich List, 2018, I made the following points:
- the rich and super-rich may be more heterogeneous than hitherto (see Aaron Davis’ research), though the reliance on inherited capital doubtless remains key;
- a high proportion of the rich and super-rich, well under 1% of the population and above all comprising those I have referred to as transnational or ‘nomadic’ ‘capital monopolists’, exercise a typically decisive influence over the power elites of nation states and the latter’s policy decisions;
- these capital monopolists and their allies are the principal agents of a rapidly accelerating growth in wealth and income inequality;
- the ‘British Dream’ – namely, that talent and hard work reap their rewards – is, like its older cousin in the USA, a myth that amounts to a kind of symbolic violence’ against ‘the many’;
- the global ideology of neoliberalism affords protective cover for capital monopolists and their allies and co-optees.
I want to append here a brief note on my ‘greedy bastards hypothesis’ (GBH) and its insinuation of culpability. The GBH asserts that material, social and – largely in their wake – health inequalities are a mix of intended and unintended consequence of the behaviour of capital monopolists and their allies within and without the capital executive. This is because the policies the ‘very few’ purchase from national governments lead directly to a series of social changes – via the political option of austerity – that serve to strangle those asset flows crucial for good health and longevity in those already disadvantaged.
Colleagues have occasionally pointed out that reference to the GBH weakens my argument that this is fundamentally about enduring social structures rather than morally corrupt or evil individuals. I can understand this reservation. It is indeed the casual salience of social structures, most notably social class, that I wanted and want to emphasize.
But there is in my view an issue of culpability too, and it would be wrong to shirk it. Shaming and blaming both take power to enact effectively. I have used the idea of ‘weaponising stigma’ to denote the calculated adding of blame to shame on the part of the state against the disadvantaged and otherwise vulnerable, thereby facilitating their neglect or sanctioning (eg wage freezes and welfare cuts via the introduction of Universal Credit). Neither shame nor blame can be made to stick against the likes of capital monopolists, whose power far exceeds that of critics representing ‘the many’.
Of course members of the capitalist executive in general, and the capital monopolists in particular, do not exhaust the referents of the term ‘greedy bastards’, far from it. Yet their qualifications for inclusion in this category are in some respects exceptional. How is this? Two criteria would seem to me to be decisive. They both imply an unavoidable reflexivity. Looking the other way and rationalisations don’t cut it. First, the use to which extreme forms of capital ownership are put (eg the use of tax havens, exploitative rentier activity, ‘casino capitalist’ bet-placing, donorship to pro-neoliberal political parties and the investment of ‘dark money’ in non-transparent right-wing thinktanks). Second, the conspicuous co-existence of the enhanced and politically willful disadvantaging and suffering of ‘the many’.
So, it is social structures, especially those of social class, which have not only survived but bitten even deeper into people’s lives on the demise of industrial, ‘Fordist’ capitalism, that are of paramount sociological import. BUT this is NOT to excuse that very small ‘few’ of ‘the few’ whose excrutiating personal and familial indulgencies are an insult to ‘the many’. We are indeed plagued by individually identifiable ‘greedy bastards’. Moreover the day when they can be effectively named, shamed, blamed and held to account may not be that far off. Before or by 2050 some sociologists argue.