the richest 200 people own as much as the bottom 40%
by Vinay Gupta • April 15, 2008 • The Global Picture • 2 Comments
Food is become increasingly scarce and expensive, and it is already unaffordable for many people. The world’s 200 wealthiest people have as much money as about 40 percent of the global population, and yet 850 million people have to go to bed hungry every night. This calamity is “one of the worst violations of human dignity,” says former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,547198,00.html
One is not the cause of the other, but the implied correlation sure is good for making headlines.
Hm. Well, I’m not sure about that.
The system in which the “money tokens” circulate in has a property – enormous concentration of the tokens in some areas.
Some people would regard that kind of concentration effect as a bug – perhaps something in the definition of property causes problems.
For example, many cultures treated land as something which could not be owned. Land was something you moved over. Property was stuff like your shoes. A close analogy is the way we treat air on earth – it’s *free* and it’s universally available.
It’s easy to see that in a space faring culture air could be property. People might die because they couldn’t afford air, in the same way that people on earth are now dying because land was turned into property, and now they can’t afford the land they need to grow the food they need to live.
So, yeah, I think the two facts are correlated by the system which generates and manages property rights. And I think that this concentration clearly indicates that there are some bugs.