Richest 2% hold half the world’s assets

From the Financial Times:

Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest two per cent of adults own more than 50 per cent of the world’s assets while the poorest half hold only 1 per cent of wealth. [...]

Adults with more than $2,200 of assets were in the top half of the global wealth league table, while those with more than $61,000 were in the top 10 per cent, according to the data from the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-Wider).

To belong to the top 1 per cent of the world’s wealthiest adults you would need more than $500,000, something that 37m adults have achieved.

First of all, wealth is not "distributed" making certain exceptions for those who've obtained their money illegally, wealth goes to those who "earn" it. (An old-fashioned concept, I know.)

Second, while this information is quite useful, it's obviously driven by an agenda, which is the redistribution, aka theft, of the world's wealth, from those people and nations that have earned it, to those who have not. Just as wealthy people have by and large earned their money, so have wealthy nations. The U.S., to take a non-random example, has benefited in financial terms from countless factors, such as the hard-working disposition of many of its citizens, the rule of law, the foresight and courage of its founders (all, ahem, white males), and its fortunate geographical situation which includes abundant land and relative isolation from potential enemies. Some of this, no doubt, luck, but much of it is not. We Americans live in part, for example, on the intellectual and social capital bequeathed to us by our founders and our ancestors; if others have not had such luck or such worthy ancestors, that's hardly our fault.

Of course, many of our advantages and much of our good fortune are precisely what President Bush and his predecessors and successors are in the process of throwing away, secure borders and mass immigration among them.

As for we the wealthy citizens of the West, it might help the whiners among us, such as those who recently helped elect a Democratic Congressional majority, to realize that we are indeed very fortunate.