In 2011 388 of the world’s richest people owned as much wealth as the poorest half of mankind combined: by 2015, Oxfam claimed this wealth was concentrated in the hands of just 62! Though inequality appears to have increased everywhere, commentators claim it is literally off the charts in the United States of America. According to the International Labour Organisation’s 2013 World of Work report, the US stood at 48 on the Gini coefficient (0 signifies perfect equality in incomes across all households and 100 that one rich household gets all the income of the entire country), while the 25 other developed countries in the study were between 20 and 35 on the Gini.
Rising global inequality is a root cause of much of the social disassociation that has led to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the USA, and some believe that the causes of this equality can be largely found internally in the general decline of progressive movements, inclusive of the influence of trade unionism, and externally in the absence of proper governance mechanisms to deal with enhanced globalization.
