Fewer than 60,000 people – 0.001% of the world’s population – control three times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity, according to a report that argues global inequality has reached such extremes that urgent action has become essential.
The authoritative World Inequality Report 2026, based on data compiled by 200 researchers, also found that the top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90% combined, while the poorest half captures less than 10% of total global earnings.
Wealth – the value of people’s assets – was even more concentrated than income, or earnings from work and investments, the report found, with the richest 10% of the world’s population owning 75% of wealth and the bottom half just 2%.
In almost every region, the top 1% was wealthier than the bottom 90% combined, the report found, with wealth inequality increasing rapidly around the world.
“The result is a world in which a tiny minority commands unprecedented financial power, while billions remain excluded from even basic economic stability,” the authors, led by Ricardo Gómez-Carrera of the Paris School of Economics, wrote.
Guillotines are surprisingly cheap to build.
The implicit song here goes hard
.22lr even cheaper and less assembly required
Would need to be able to penetrate their thick skulls.
Maybe we should use a higher caliber bullet?
It penetrates and ricochets inside instead of exiting, makes for good brain jelly!
Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is poor.
Yet fewer people are poor because we instituted capitalist policies. Moving away from mercantilism was a great idea and benefitted most to a greater degree than mercantilism provides. Now we need to move beyond capitalism to address the failures of capitalism.
Because of capitalist policies or because of advancements in science, engineering, and medicine culminating around the same time that just happened to coincide with capitalism’s birth?
Capitalism only benefits capitalists.
Fewer people are poor despite the capitalists, not because of.
Their giant hoards of wealth exemplify how many more could have been pulled out of poverty in the last 100-150 years.
The previous poster is more or less quoting Marx and Engles who praised capitalism in the same way and for the same things, while suggesting it was time for it to be superceded in the same way.
Now I know that not everybody has read their work, but you sound like somebody who might be interested.
Because directing more wealth away from feudal authorities/noble families to private individuals was good for increasing wealth distribution. This happened at different times in different places.
Capitalism only benefits capitalists
Nah, it can benefit the rank and file provided the wealth was poorly distributed before by creating more jobs. This is exactly what happened when it was adopted by most nations in the 19th century.
Fewer people are poor despite the capitalists, not because of.
China’s for-profit business investments in Africa since 2000 are an example if capitalist policies bringing people out of poverty. Im not sure your claim has the validity you think it does.
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists. (G. K. Chesterton)
60,000 is way to many. They need to be able to fit on a giga yacht.
And then we make an artificial reef out of it
The coral all died.
Some pressing and stomping and they will nicely fit to any rusted sea tanker.
More like eventually building their own Elysium.
Then we can shoot the fucker down and take them all out in one fell swoop. What a beautiful sunrise that would make.
This seems not conducive to the common wellbeing of humanity I think.
It’s gone from can’t everyone just pay your fair share of taxes?
To can’t we at least tax the rich?
How about just the 1%?
Ok…, how about just the 0.001%?
And then somehow conservatives leaders will convince a voter base to take to the streets with pitchforks and torches, claiming it’s tyranny, then once they’re elected, the leaders will still tax the fucking voter base.
The fact is money is relative. $100k USD is a lot of money in New Guinea and is not going to buy as much in London. This is why it is perfectly acceptable for someone like Thiel to assemble a private army with his wealth while people starve because they haven’t worked the grind correctly like Musk, Thiel or the Mountbatten-Windsors have /s.
You had me in the first half…
People might think that the extremity is a good thing as it will force change, which may be true, but realistically the world will be in for an extended period of conflict/war/suffering first and that period will probably last the rest of our lives.
Boomers hit that sweet spot. Now they get to check out as things are about to get real bad. Not that boomers everywhere in the world had it good. But a lot of them did.
Boomers hit that sweet spot.
American boomers, maybe. The 60s/70s was real shit for most of the Third World.
Much of our modern Economic Anxiety driving MAGA and the reactionary insanity of our foreign policy is these same Boomers being forced to live in a world that isn’t just the car dealerships in Detroit commanding the global economy.
For the 90s Kids, life outside the US hasn’t been this good in a century or more. Whether you’re in Bogota, Berlin, Beijing, or Bankok, it’s a time of unprecedented plenty.
The fact that America isn’t this shining city on a hill anymore is what Trumpsters find so galling.
For the 90s Kids, life outside the US hasn’t been this good in a century or more. Whether you’re in Bogota, Berlin, Beijing, or Bankok, it’s a time of unprecedented plenty.
In some places, like south america, things have not been that great since the start of a wave of right wing governments rising, unfortunately…
One reason why Buenos Aires didn’t make the list.
I see what you mean, in terms of democracy being a problem capitalism is trying to solve and, also, that the rich and powerful will never allow us to simply vote away their ill-gotten wealth and power.
I don’t think that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try though or just lament that we were born too late though.
If enough people wanted to, we could change things very quickly. I don’t see why that would mean we would have to have those all of those things, let alone for an extended period. Really, you’re rationalising a status quo bias.
If you aren’t straight, white or a man you are already suffering.
I feel like numbers at this point just are pointless. It’s like, can we use vocabulary that actually describes the situation instead of updating this every time the decimal point shifts?
Describing it in terms of wealth is kind of dumb. It gives the idea that the systems that caused this (Imperialism, colonialism, capitalism) are the solution. Like, the global South just needs “investment”. The numbers are this bad because of a century of western “investment” in its exploitation the global South.
There isn’t a number attached to this that somehow fixes the problem when we reach it. This is about what essentially amounts to slavery and subjugation of the majority of this planet. The language of these news articles is so passive. Like it’s describing the amount of stars in the galaxy.
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Remind me again how capitalism isn’t the problem? lmao
Do you think in feudal times things were better?
Well, I’ll tell you one thing. The solution for some of the bad monarchies should be taking place today but for the bad people running majority of countries but nobody has the guts to pull one for the team.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
In the entire existence of humanity, class struggle still has yet to end.
I started to feel that’s a mathematical issue, not an economic issue. Since the internet is a thing, a person’s influence and wealth can increase exponentially(benefiting from the networking effect aka power law), while the best tax law can do is still linear.
We need a tax law that grows exponentially. After certain points, it should collect almost 100% of the “controllable assets” (assets you can control, not necessarily owed).
But of course, we will never get it. People who have the will to climb the ladder tend to have less empathy for the masses, and they need to pay back to their stakeholders to help them get on top. It’s another paradox we need to deal with.
TBH the only thing that can fix humanity is extraterrestrial life lol.
I would call it systemic, in fact I’d argue it’s the central flaw of capitalism (but one that imo can be mostly fixed with heavy regulation and taxes scaling to near 100% as you say).
When wealth = power, those with wealth will always attract even more wealth.
TBH the only thing that can fix humanity is extraterrestrial life lol.
It’s an overused statement by now but it seems worth repeating: many people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Followed through until the doom and gloom. Organize!
a tax law that grows exponentially
We’ve had this before, and can again. Look up FDR-era marginal rates.
It is true that the poorest people have very little money and the wealthiest people have a great deal of money, so the math checks out
Billions of poor people are giving their money every single day to companies owned by rich people, this explains why rich people are getting richer
Does anyone have any ideas how we can stop poor people from giving their money to the rich? Every time they use Google they are given an electric shock ? Every time someone goes to buy something on Amazon they get personally spanked by a local Jeff Bezos lookalike?
My proposal is taxing the everloving shit out of the richest people. 50% wealthtax over €20 million (a number I pulled out of my ass, but I think it’s important to not hurt the regular small businesses). If you can’t sell your assets for some reason, the assets are forfeited to be operated or sold by the government, to redistribute the result through welfare and UBI.
And what about thhe poor billionaires who can’t own more than 20 million euro you say? I don’t give a shit. Let them off themselves if it’s impossible to live with.
Rich people will give their money to enrich themselves or to fuck someone over. But giving their money freely to help humanity? Or accept being taxed? They are seriously homicidally resistant to that.
Off topic, I think billionaires should be required to do the lowest position in their organizations for a month once a year with their net worth assets frozen, their communication with any yes man or enabler being severed for that month, and be forced to live off of that monthly stipend for 1 month and if they get “fired” they cannot retaliate if the firing was in good faith and they lose 65-70% of their stock options for failing to do bare minimum competence.
Then they get imprisoned for taxfraud, and have their wealth confiscated. I no longer give half a shit about those parasites.
We’ve seen them voluntarily do homeless stints. It’s just not the same thing when you know you’re going back to your mansion in a few weeks. Just fucking tax their wealth bracket out of existence.
Oh I want them taxed, but like I said, they’d rather watch the world burn than be forced to give a dollar.
Then don’t take the dollar, take the fucking hand.
Odds are when asked for the second dollar, it will be a lot more forthcoming.
I think a year of every five, but ok.
I have to respond to “with at a 50% wealthtax over 20 million euros” because that is the easy answer
Europe already has a lot of experience with taxing the ultra wealthy
In 1990, about a dozen European countries had a wealth tax, but by 2019, all but three had eliminated the tax because of the difficulties and costs associated with both design and enforcement.[6][7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax#In_practice
Normally progressives like to point to Europe for policy success. Not this time. The experiment with the wealth tax in Europe was a failure in many countries. France’s wealth tax contributed to the exodus of an estimated 42,000 millionaires between 2000 and 2012, among other problems. Only last year, French president Emmanuel Macron killed it.
In 1990, twelve countries in Europe had a wealth tax. Today, there are only three: Norway, Spain, and Switzerland. According to reports by the OECD and others, there were some clear themes with the policy: it was expensive to administer, it was hard on people with lots of assets but little cash, it distorted saving and investment decisions, it pushed the rich and their money out of the taxing countries—and, perhaps worst of all, it didn’t raise much revenue.
Paris (AFP) – Bernard Arnault, the billionaire boss of the world’s biggest luxury conglomerate LVMH, has picked a fight with the French government by suggesting that companies could flee France for the United States to escape a planned tax hike.
And it’s hard because there will always be another country that wants rich people
Tax transfers to those countries to the ever-loving-shit degree. Want to move money to this tax paradise? Sure. We take 90%. Not on profit. On transfer. Let’s see them work around that. Want to move it to a country that doesn’t have the same rules? Sure. We take 90% of that.
90%
Then they’ll be welcome to fuck right the fuck off, but I absolutely assure you, there is someone willing to start a new company in their place, if the market was previously in the “make you a billionaire” territory, but now the person can “only” accrue €20 million, someone will fill that hole, but that someone won’t be a piece of shit like Jeff Besos, because they won’t be allowed to become that economically powerful. Instead it’ll be 500 smaller companies, all competing for the market.
What happened to the different european wealth taxes is that it was implemented with loopholes as big as the France-England tunnel, and any rich asshole who didn’t feel like paying taxes, could just transfer it somewhere else, and call it an investment. Instead, tax every single cent they move out of the country at 90%. That way they’re forced to invest their money in the country they’re making their money off of. Maybe give them a rebate if they move it within Europe to facilitate growth across the union, let’s tax that at 45% instead then.
That’s because they left giant loopholes in those laws. Like allowing the ultra wealthy to remove their money from the country. They got that money because of the country, they don’t get to then fuck off and take that wealth out of the country. They’re free to leave, the majority of their wealth is not.
And poor nobles can cry me a river, sell the assets. Take the stocks too. The entire idea of shareholders running the company needs to die anyways.
If it’s a free market within the country, the vaccuum created by the wealthy leaving will be filled in by smaller business servicing the same industries.
Big corporations that have wealth concentrating with the top brass and share holders do not add anything of value to the market over cooperatives and other worker owned incentive structures.
First you need to put the non-rich in charge and prevent them being bought off by the rich. That’s the hard part, but not impossible.
Billions of poor people are giving their money
Well… their labor
Those puny little ants outnumber us 100 to 1. And if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life!
But we’ve just been playing all summer.
