Together, (Carlos) Slim, (Bill) Gates, (Warren) Buffett, and (Mukesh) Ambani control more wealth than the world’s poorest 57 countries. The danger is that while we have a global economy that knows how to concentrate money and power in an ever smaller set of hands, we have no robust mechanism to alert us to the injustice, dangers, and instability that come along with this package. Someday, to our peril, the poor will find their own way to remind us.
The four richest men share a combined wealth bigger than that of the 57 poorest countries together.
Just to give an idea of the magnitude, I checked the Wikipedia page for the index of poorest countries. To measure this wealth, I used the gross domestic product (GDP) at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita, that is, the value of all final goods and services produced within a nation in a given year divided by the average (or mid-year) population for the same year. To put it in layman terms, this index tells us the total money value of all final goods and services that are produced in an economy over a period of time.
This is the list of the 20 poorest ones (by decreasing order; meaning Zimbabwe is the poorest in the list), together with the population figures in millions. This gives us a combined population of 339.8 million people. I do not have the time to go through all 57 countries, but I believe this shortened list gives a good idea. The combined wealth of this four men, equals the combined production of these countries in a given year (population figures in millions next to each country):
- Comoros 0.8
- Madagascar 20.6
- Guinea 10
- Tokelau 1.4
- Ethiopia 85.2
- Malawi 15
- Mozambique 22.8
- Sierra Leone 6.4
- Togo 6.6
- Rwanda 10.7
- Afghanistan 28.3
- Central African Republic 4.4
- Eritrea 5.2
- Niger 15.3
- Guinea-Bissau 1.6
- Somalia 9.3
- Liberia 3.9
- Burundi 8.9
- Congo, Democratic Republic of the 70.9
- Zimbabwe 12.5
Now, I would love for someone to come and tell me that privilege, as a concept to analyze socioeconomic facts and trends, does not exist.
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