ABSTRACT
It is clear that dramatic wealth and income disparities are a major characteristic of all capitalistic economies. A few findings from surveys conducted at various points in time may help state the terms of the problem. A 46-country survey froma 1999 showed that the part of the aggregate national income accruing to the bottom 30 per cent of the population in 1992 was but one per cent, while the top 20 per cent of the population received a 90 per cent slice of the pie. An income distribution study of 45 large countries throughout the world found that the share of the national income earned by the poorest population decile was 0.5 per cent of the total, whilst that of the richest decile stood at 54.3 per cent. In 2003, Bill Gates alone owned assets in a total amount equal to the GDP of the whole of Norway and one per cent of the US population was reckoned to own about 40 per cent of the nation’s entire wealth (see Albert 2003, pp. 17 and 28). In 2008, the aggregate wealth of the highest-income families, one per cent of the US population, equalled the aggregate incomes of the lowest-income families, compounding a 40 per cent share of that country’s entire population. In pre-2009 years, the wealthiest families in the top slice of the world population owned, in the aggregate, more assets than those owned by the bottom 50 per cent slice (as reported in the Credit Suisse 2010 Global Wealth Report).1 One of the most striking findings in Piketty’s recent bestseller (2013, pp. 47-48) is that the 30-35 per cent share of the national income earned by the top decile of the US population in the 1940s spiked to 45-50 per cent between 2000 and 2010.2 In 2014, the jobless rates of Greece and Spain stood at 27 per cent and 14.4 per cent respectively.
