We are the world - or?

The richest 10 percent have almost 90 percent of the total assets in the world, while the poorest half of the global population has a mere 1 percent of the assets. The richest percent alone controls 46 percent, almost half of the world.

 This and a lot more can be found in the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2012*. Their figures show that global household wealth totaled USD 222.7 trillion in mid-2012, equivalent to USD 48,500 for each of the 4.6 billion adults in the world. The corresponding values for the end of the year 2000 are USD 113.4 trillion in aggregate and an average of USD 30,700 for the 3.6 billion adults alive at that time. Thus global household wealth rose by 96% between end-2000 and mid-2012 and wealth per adult climbed 58%.   

"To be among the wealthiest half of the world, an adult needs only USD 3,700 in assets, once debts have been subtracted."

Averages are deceitful, especially when it comes to distribution of wealth. Some are dirt poor while others are stinking rich. 

Credit Suisse estimates that there are 84,500 Ultra High Net Worth (UHNW) individuals worldwide with net assets exceeding USD 50 million each. North America dominates the regional ranking, with 40,000 UHNW residents (47%), while Europe hosts 22,000 individuals (26%), and 12,800 (15%) reside in Asia-Pacific countries, excluding China and India.


The enormous Indian middle class. really? 95% of the population in India have assets below 10,000 dollars.

First, it is even hard to comprehend how such a skewed distribution of wealth is at all possible. Second, it is astounding that there is not more attention to it, Third, I think is is absolutely clear that redistribution of wealth is  the easiest, the quickest and the most morally just approach to global poverty. Not the only approach of course;  over time it is essential that wealth creation is reaching everybody. But even to start that process presupposes that the dirt poor get access to resources, which equals wealth.


Read also:
Growing inequality, between people, between countries, between region, between urban and rural.
Who gave you your property?
The wealth Pyramid - a sign of poverty
And of course, I write a lot about this in Garden Earth. 


*Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook. – an in-depth project that offers investors the most
comprehensive study of world wealth, and which remains the only study that analyzes the wealth of all the world's 4.6 billion adults.

Who gave you your property?

La propriété, c'est le vol! said French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his 1840 book Qu'est-ce que la propriété ? ou Recherche sur le principe du Droit et du Gouvernment (What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government). This perception was not new. The famous Marquis de Sade (Yes, the same guy whose name formed sadism) said:

"Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft."

Those who are in favour of property rights to be almost unlimited and sacrosanct tend to be the same as those who wants to limit the extent of government. But they, conveniently, overlook a very fundamental fact. They have got their property from government and it is only government that can ensure their perpetuated right to the property. Before there was government, before there were laws and a state that could enforce them there was no property. And in most societies most things “belonged to” the community or the state. The root of private property is a privilege extracted from governments. This continues today where governments convert new things to goods and markets, for instance eco-system services. The market and control of such services is instituted by governments and through various processes allocated to private owners. 

Over years, different groups, with the support of the state (or being part of the state) came to take over larger and larger parts of property, such as the war lords, later becoming the respected nobles or the financiers of the state's war, the emerging capitalists of high finance. It is estimated that some 1.5 million valuable items were stolen from the Old Summer Palace in China, when ransacked by the French and the British 1860. Victor Hugo (1985) wrote:

One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace.[...] All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable and splendid museum of the Orient. It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewellery. What a great exploit, what a windfall! One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away.

To stimulate the transcontinental railway building, the US federal government gave one fourth of Minnesota and Washington and a fifth of Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota and Montana to the rail road companies; an area bigger than France (Lindblom 2001). It is interesting to note that a professor in the stronghold for "free market" economics acknowledge this. "Land, natural resources, and government contracts and licenses are the predominant sources of the wealth of our billionaires, and all of these factors come from the government" says Ragharam Rajan, economist in Chicago (IHT 2011), referring to billionaires of India (read also NYT).

And no doubt, enormous wealth and therefore property is generated by the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. How property in the collapsing Soviet Union was distributed was a crash course in how property is unequally distributed to those that are close to the power. 

It is an entirely subjective and political decision weather some should be given unique rights to land or other resources or they should be common. A government could as well declare a universal right to food as the private right to land. For those, like the author, that is raised in a fully developed capitalist market society it is almost hard to conceptualise how a world without private property could look like. Still, in many parts of the world, forests and farm land are often owned by the state or by the local community. The point is neither that private property by itself is good or bad, nor to claim that anyone with property is a thief (which would then include myself as well). It is to clarify that it is a privilege based on state sanction, and that the unique rights that property has been given has very little to do in a discussion about freedom, and even less that property rights should form a moral justification for limitation of other peoples' freedom. First when we have cleared the myth, can we discuss property in a rational way.



"Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can" sings John Lennon in Imagine. This is probably our greatest challenge. To think outside the box.

Did you pay Angeles Duran today?

After billions of years the sun finally has an owner - a woman from the Spanish region of Galicia said she has registered the star at a local notary public as her property. Angeles Duran, 49, told the online edition of El Mundo she took the step in September after reading about an American who had registered himself as the owner of the moon and several planets. Read more.

I simply love this kind of news. It says so much about our world, and I don't think I have to comment it further.

Why not call it by its proper name: theft.

I believe most people have understood that most property is based on privilege of different sorts, but not that most of it derives from theft or violence. How did that piece of land that is sold today originally come into hands of a private person?
well there are some possible sources. But by and large they almost all come to that the government gave it away or sold it to a private person. Because it is government that defines property, it all derives from government, or the state.

To convert land from public or communal stewardship to private ownership is just the first, but an essential step to make land into a tradeable commodity, and part of the transformation of society into a market society. Speaking of the "primitive nature" of indigenous peoples, US Commissioner of Indian Affairs, T. Hartley Crawford stated that, unless some system is marked out by which there shall be a separate allotment of land to each individual […] you will look in vain for any general casting off of savagism. Common property and civilization cannot co-exist.(Kinney 1975).

It is interesting to note that a professor in the stronghold for "free market" economics acknowledge this. "Land, natural resources, and government contracts and licenses are the predominant sources of the wealth of our billionaries, and all of these factors come from the governement" says Ragharam Rajan, economist in Chicago (IHT 26 Jan 2011, the superrich pull ever farther away), referring to billionaires of India. This is the case of the billionaires of China and Russia as well, and was certainly true also for the robber barons and the railroad magnates of the 19th last century.

And no doubt, enormous wealth and therefore property is generated by the American wars in Iraq and Afganistan. And what about all the banks and financial institutions that have been bailed out by government. Using "our" money to cover "their" losses. That amounts to nothing but theft.

"Property is theft" ( La propriété, c'est le vol) already the French anarchist Proudhon in 1840.

Having said that, obviously I don't mean that all people that have property are thieves, I have property myself as a starters and I don't consider myself a thief. And there are reasonable arguments in favour of why a person should "own" his or her own dwelling, clothes and perhaps the means of production (which is rarely the case today, where the means of production mostly are owned by a few). Farmers need to own - or at least have long term control over - the land they farm (well it can be communally own as well as most land was before stolen by the government or private interests). The defense for private property mostly takes it start in nice description of how private entrepreneurs create wealth both for themselves and other people by setting up a small enterprise. Also this can be discussed, but it should be noted that this image of how private property is mainly used is showing a very small part of what private property is about in most parts of the world.

There is some essential truth in what Rousseau wrote:
“The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society [Rousseau certainly was not referring to what we today call civil society, but rather to what we call civilization]. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared by someone who, uprooting the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow-men: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all and the earth to no one” (Rousseau 1964).