The Economist’s January 20th edition had a special report on the gap between the world’s rich and poor.
In the article, Credit Suisse estimated that 0.5% of the world population are millionaires (there are 24.2 millions of them): 16% of them inherited their wealth, 47% are entrepreneurs, and 23% simply saved themselves into the club. In this last category we hold our hopes. Enter the book The Millionaire Next Door. Most millionaires do not live the lifestyles of celebrity, mansion with servants, carefree spending, fine dining and wining, art collections, etc. They simply enjoy the assurance of financial security and go on with their frugality as always. They lived next door to you and drive an used Ford.
From the beginning of the man kind, societies came up with as many formula of distributing wealth (and power) as there were people who could read and write. Every one of those formula strive to be fair. They varied by the degree of sophistication, the costs of the re-distribution, and, most importantly, the amount of people who agreed (or disagreed) with the formula.
We knew there are now two main camps of those formula: one based on Karl Marx’s theories and the other on Adam Smith’s. There are really no pure forms left in this 21st century; they are all just new mixtures of different portions of socialism and capitalism. Asian countries had more chances to experiment: China tried total socialism, total free market (at Hong Kong), and now centrally administrated open market. The United States, for decades, played with taxation and social welfare systems.
For all these social experiments, the inequality worsens as societies progresses. Only few small countries managed to distribute their wealth more evenly. The chasm between the haves and have-nots are ever widening, despite all attempts to reverse that trend. Soon, there will be only the worst option left: wars.