What Would GLOBAL** Wealth Equality Mean?
Almost half of U.S. families would be RICHER, and almost all would be better off
"Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn't be more wrong"Â by Jason Hickel
​​
How much wealth would people have if all of the wealth in the whole world were shared equally?
The total personal (as opposed to government-owned) wealth of the world in the year 2022 was approximately $454.4 Trillion.*
The number of people in the world (including children) in 2022 was approximately 8.0 billion.
Do the division and one gets approximately $56,800 of personal wealth per every man, woman and child on the planet, i.e., the global average per capita wealth.
(Note, especially if you do your own research: the average (also called the 'mean') of a bunch of numbers and the median of a bunch of numbers are possibly very different. For example, take the three numbers: 1, 2 and 2997. The median of those numbers is 2. The average (or 'mean') of those numbers is 1000. Why? The number 2 is in the middle in the sense that just as many numbers are greater than as are less than it, so it is by definition the median. But if you add up all three numbers to get 3000 and divide by the number of numbers, 3, you get 1000, so 1000 is by definition the average ('mean.') When dealing with, say, the incomes of each family in a nation, the median is typically a much lower value than the average ('mean') because the numbers are typically skewed to the high end as in our example of 1, 2 and 2997 because a small number of families have extremely high incomes that dwarf most of the others. The average ('mean') is a very important number when dealing with things like wealth inequality for this reason. If all the numbers were the same as the average ('mean') then the total would remain the same. Thus the average ('mean') value is the value that everybody would have if everybody had exactly the same amount.)
A family of four would thus own a bit more than $227,200 of wealth. The average number of persons per "household" (as opposed to family) is about 2.6, so a household this size would have $147,680 of wealth. This, recall, is if GLOBAL wealth were distributed equally.​
To put this in context regarding Americans, consider this. Many American families have zero or less than zero net worth. "A recent Clever Real Estate survey asked Americans the approximate total value of their savings, investments and assets, minus their debt, and about half of Americans (52%) report their net worth is less than $30,000. Even more alarming, 25% of Americans said their net worth is $0 or negative — meaning they owe more in debt than the value of their assets." [source here]
On the high end, of course, some families own billions of dollars of net worth. The Rockefeller family fortune is conservatively estimated to be at least $8.4 billion. The Waltons who own Wal-Mart have a family fortune that is $267 billion.
It is well known that the United States is a "rich nation" and most of the world is economically much poorer. It is interesting, therefore, to know this:
If all the wealth of the world were somehow magically redistributed among all people on the planet equally, to make the billions of poor people in places like India, Ethiopia, Haiti and Bangladesh equal in wealth to Americans and everybody else, then at least 45% of American households (considered here to be 2.6 people) would be richer, not poorer. (Footnote ** shows that if all wealth in the Unites States were shared equally, then about 78% of households would be richer.)
This is because in 2023 (when net worth was higher than in 2022 due to inflation) 45% of U.S. households had a net worth less than $147,316.00, and therefore in 2022, when people had lower net worth, even more than 45% likely had a net worth less than the $147,680 all households globally would have had in 2022 if wealth had been distributed equally per individual.Â
The U.S. households that would be poorer with global wealth equality would include the 18% of U.S. households (i.e., those in or above the 82nd percentile) whose 2023 household annual income was greater than $1,009,860.00.  [source here]Â
This underscores how nationality is not a very useful category when thinking about the consequences of making the world more equal or about who would benefit from this and who would not.Â
Global Equality Is About Sharing, Not Leveling Down
​The goal of global wealth equality is not, however, to redistribute wealth in the simplistic way that the above discussion would imply. The goal is not to "level down" by taking away from any family owning more than $227,200. On the contrary, the goal is to "level up" in a manner consistent with preserving a good environment for future generations. The goal is to create an economic and political system in the world in which all people have an equal status economically and politically. What does this mean?
Economically, it means that everybody would be welcome to participate in a sharing economy in exchange for contributing reasonably to that economy. In the sharing economy, goods and services that are sufficiently abundant are free to those who have a reasonable need or desire of them. And things that are scarce are rationed equitably according to need. Anybody who is willing to contribute, even if it means initially just learning a useful skill, can join the sharing economy; nobody is involuntarily unemployed.​
Politically, it means everybody who supports the principles of equality and mutual aid would be able to attend their local community and workplace assembly and have an equal say with all others in making community and workplace decisions, i.e., laws that would apply to all people in that community or workplace. No higher bodies would have law-making powers. Social and economic order and coordination on a larger-than-local level would be achieved by voluntary federation: local assemblies would send delegates to "higher level" bodies whose purpose is to craft proposals (not laws) that the local assemblies are free to accept and carry out, or reject until the proposal, after back and forth negotiation, is amended to be satisfactory.
Local assemblies would each decide whether or not to be in a sharing economy with other local assemblies. They would each on their own decide how to contribute to the sharing economy and, in turn, the other local assemblies would each, on their own, decide with what other local assemblies they wished to share, i.e., be in a common sharing economy. In practice, large geographical regions and widespread economic enterprises, each consisting of many local assemblies in voluntary federation, would acquire reputations on the basis of which other large geographical regions and enterprises would decide whether or not to be in the same sharing economy with them.
These reputations, along with other information, would make it possible for people to decide who they felt was making a reasonable contribution to the sharing economy and who wasn't. Local community and workplace assemblies, in turn, would make decisions about what was expected of their own members (what was a "reasonable" contribution to the economy, and what it is reasonable for people to take from it) with the goal in mind of preserving their good reputation, and hence membership, in the larger sharing economy. Those people who do not contribute reasonably would be outside the sharing economy and would be, essentially, beggars whom others could give to or not as they pleased, from those goods and services that they could reasonably take, for themselves alone, from the sharing economy.
What About the Well-To-Do?
​Here is where the principle of "leveling up" comes in. It's all about how people who value equality and mutual aid decide what a "reasonable" contribution to the sharing economy is. People who live in a region that has a highly developed infrastructure of roads, railways, factories and universities etc., or in a region with important but scarce natural resources, would probably be expected to contribute more things or provide greater services to a sharing economy than people from poorer regions, at least initially until the poorer regions developed their productive capacities more. In a sharing economy, unlike a capitalist one, everybody benefits when the productive capacity of somebody else improves. It makes it possible for everybody to choose between two pleasant possibilities: everybody works less but still enjoys the same amount of shared economic productivity, or everybody continues to work the same and enjoys greater shared economic productivity. Mutual aid rather than competition is the basis of people's relationships with each other in a sharing economy. People in poorer regions might enjoy less wealth initially than people in richer regions, but over time the result of mutual aid and sharing will lead to greater and greater equality in standard of living across formerly richer and poorer regions.​
What does "leveling up" mean for a well-to-do American family with substantially more than $227,200 of personal wealth? Let's say the family owns a $1 million dollar home and owns $5 million worth of stocks. The $5 million in stock represent shares in businesses where people work. In the sharing economy businesses are activities that people do, they are not things that other people own. The $5 million of stock certificates would become just worthless pieces of paper (as would all forms of money itself). The adults in this family would lose their income from these stocks. But if they contributed to the sharing economy in a reasonable (as determined by their local assembly) way then they wouldn't need any "income" because they could take freely what they needed or desired from the stores where products and services were made available (or they could "get in line" so to speak for scarce things equitably rationed according to need in a manner determined by the local assembly, which they could attend as an equal with all others.)
This family would continue to have the most important things that their former income provided: a good place to live and all of the things required for a comfortable and satisfying life, good education, health care, vacations, and security in old age (older retired people, children, disabled people, etc. would be members of the sharing economy because their "reasonable" required contribution would be zero.)
In many ways this family's lives would be much better than before:
the world they lived in would be a friendlier place instead of one in which ruling elites used Orwellian wars of social control to make people fear other nationalities or ethnic groups;
they would benefit from the fact that government wealth would be used for things like schools and libraries and hospitals that actually make our lives better instead of things that don't, such as military forces and weapons and "Homeland Security" and prisons;
they would share in the far more useful economic productivity of almost four million Americans who presently produce little of real value in our prisons or the military and who would contribute far more if we had a global sharing economy;
they would benefit from no longer having to endure mind-numbing and anxiety-producing "ask your doctor about" advertisements and planned obsolescence;
those of them who were managers would no longer confront workers in the old labor-management conflict because everybody in the workplace assembly would have an equal say in all decisions and would have equal standards of living;
they would no longer have anxiety about where they stood in the hierarchy of wealth and respect from poor to rich;
they would no longer live in a world in which they were resented and disliked by those at the very bottom of an unequal society, or those who were unemployed because the economy, unlike a sharing economy, only employs people if it will make a profit for an employer;
and they would be healthier!​
What about the family's $1 million dollar home? They would continue to own that home and live in it. If there were homeless people in the community the local assembly would probably rather house them temporarily in whatever available buildings were suitable and then arrange for the construction of nice homes for them, than resort to having them housed in spare rooms of already occupied large houses. The local assembly might think differently about the multiple mansions that are usually unoccupied and are owned by a family like the Waltons, but this would affect only a very tiny percentage of Americans.
No More Ugly Debates About Who Should Be Paid More than Whom
​The global equality as outlined here will mean no more ugly debates about who should be paid more than whom. People won't work for a paycheck; they'll work to be equal members of the sharing economy. Whether they contribute as a teacher or a physician or a janitor, a factory blue-collar or white collar worker, a jet pilot or auto mechanic, an adult student or a person in charge of caring for children, and whether they live in the United States or Bangladesh, if they are in a common sharing economy then they all get "paid" the same: membership in the sharing economy.
How Do We Make it Happen?
​The most important step towards making this kind of globally equal world a reality is to make this vision of a better world something that billions of people are talking about explicitly, and to make sure that these billions of people know that they are billions in number and not a small powerless minority. This is what it means to build a revolutionary movement--talking with people about what the goal of a revolution should be, what people really want.
It also means helping people see that most people in the world already try to shape the little corner of the world over which they have any control by the values that this vision is based upon, the values without which it could never work--equality, mutual aid, concern for one another, democracy, fairness, truth. There is a minority of people, who presently rule the world, with the opposite values--inequality, domination, divide-and-rule using force and manipulation and lies. A revolutionary movement that is clear on its goals and confident in its numerical strength can remove the ruling elites from power and turn the world upside down, making it an egalitarian paradise instead of the increasingly unequal world we have today that is divided into lots of have-nots and a few haves who use violence and warmongering and lies to protect their enormous wealth, privilege and power. For further discussion of this see Thinking about Revolution and "How We CAN Remove the Rich from Power" and, regarding the nuts and bolts of what YOU can do, "Revolutionary Movement Building 101."
--------------
* This number is "Purchasing Power Parity" adjusted, which means it takes into account the fact that some things are cheaper in one country than another. If all personal property in the world were sold and the money then used to buy commodities in the country where that personal property was located, those same commodities would cost $454.4 trillion if purchased in the United States.
** Here are the results for no rich and no poor in just the United States:
If wealth and annual income were equal for all in the United States, then (based on per capita [every man, woman and child] wealth and income) every household with the average household size of 2.6 people would have $1.07 million as its share of the total wealth of the United States; it would have an annual income of $166,197. A household consisting of four individuals (such as two parents and two children) would thus have an income of $664,788 and own $1.6515 million in household and non-profit net wealth. [The arithmetic and sources are given below.]
"Americans held roughly $137.6 trillion in wealth in 2022, according to the Federal Reserve." [source here]
The population of the United States in 2022 was 333,272,411. [source here]
Division gives the wealth per person (men, women and children if it were all distributed equally) of $412,875.
Assuming a household is 2.6 persons (the average), then the wealth owned by each U.S. household (if it were all distributed equally) would be 2.6 x $412,875 = $1.07 million.Â
Total U.S. household annual income in 2022 was $21,805,000,000,000. [source here]​
Total number of households in the United States in 2022 was 131.2 million. [source here]
Division gives the annual income per household (if it were all distributed equally) in the U.S. of $21,805,000,000,000 / 131,200,000 = $166,197. ​
The annual income per individual person is the total income, $21,805,000,000,000 divided by the number of persons, 131.2 million, which is $166,197. The income (if there were equality) of a family of four would thus be 4 x $166,197 = $664,788.
The wealth owned by this family would be the wealth per person times 4 or 4 x $412,875 = $1.6515 million.
Here is the actual 2022 distribution of family wealth in the United States (the vertical axis is in thousands of dollars, so 1,000 means one million):
Based on the above plot, about 78% of households in 2022 had less wealth than $1.6515 million. This means that about 78% of U.S. households would be RICHER if all wealth in the United States were shared equally.
Dear John, thank you for this important article. Please consider submitting it to Global Research or Off-Guardian for a wider reach. I will share it on FB.