Monday, July 27, 2015

Heather Stewart — Wealth doesn't trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals

The sheer scale of the hidden assets held by the super-rich also suggests that standard measures of inequality, which tend to rely on surveys of household income or wealth in individual countries, radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor.
Milorad Kovacevic, chief statistician of the UN Development Programme's Human Development Report, says both the very wealthy and the very poor tend to be excluded from mainstream calculations of inequality.
"People that are in charge of measuring inequality based on survey data know that the both ends of the distribution are underrepresented – or, even better, misrepresented," he says.
"There is rarely a household from the top 1% earners that participates in the survey. On the other side, the poor people either don't have addresses to be selected into the sample, or when selected they misquote their earnings – usually biasing them upwards."
So it is actually worse than we thought.

The Guardian
Wealth doesn't trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals
Heather Stewart
ht Lambert Stether at Naked Capitalism and Corrente


7 comments:

Anonymous said...

We need a global capital registry. Every real asset, every financial asset, every dollar, every euro, every little dinar, peso or ruble needs to be counted. We can't get our arms around the wealth system politically if we don't have a clear idea where the wealth is.

NeilW said...

"We need a global capital registry"

You might need it but you're not going to get a global anything. Come up with another solution that has a fighting chance of happening.

Anonymous said...

We can do it over time. Some big countries need to lead the way, and sanction others that provide a shelter of secrecy and don't cooperate with the registration regime.

Simsalablunder said...

Sweden had a system to keep track on wealth. Former right wing government with its 'worlds best' Minister of Finance removed it.

NeilW said...

"We can do it over time."

No we can't. Get real.

The world just does not march to the beat of a single drum.

Anonymous said...

"single drum", Neil?

We're juts talking about inventorying, counting and assessing stuff. It's a very achievable goal. We do a decent job internationally of counting and tracking people. We can do the same with money, land and other forms of wealth.

Footsoldier said...

How does thit fit in with MMT ?

Why does it matter if taxes don't fund spending ?

Surely this has happened because central banks now issue debt $ for $ in the overnight interbank markets ?


So the question has to be asked. Is this why all around the world goverments are stopping goverment spending ? Are they trying to destroy these assets by running budget surpluses so that the people who hold these assets have to sell them back to meet their tax liabilities ?