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BY YOSHI JOHNSON

In print | November 15, 2007

I’ve really been feeling the whole ‘Class Awareness Month’ vibe lately. To be fair, I’ll plug moustaches and diabetes awareness since it’s their month, too. After the past few weeks, however, I think I should lay off the criticism of wealthy institutions and their fiscal priorities. People are thinking and talking about it now anyways and, in the end, maybe it just hits a little too close to home for the moment.

Continuing with the idea that great wealth confers great responsibility, though, I want to shift my focus from wealthy institutions to the wealthy individuals of the world. Their actions and the morality thereof may prove more revealing when subjected to scrutiny. They are, after all, the people who often finance or otherwise direct institutions of higher education and wider society. It would seem, then, that the project of realizing greater equality within the world’s population must necessarily involve this echelon of elites.

First, an overview of the world’s current distribution of wealth. According to a comprehensive UN study released in 2006, the top one percent of the world controls 40 percent of all wealth, and the top decile controls an astounding 85 percent of the world’s wealth. The bottom half of the world’s population, on the other hand, owns less than one percent of the wealth. This wealth is disproportionately concentrated in countries with the highest average incomes—that is, in the United States, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan and South Korea. The U.S. alone monopolizes a full 36 percent of all wealth, even though it amounts to a mere 6 percent of the world population.

These numbers blow my mind. Granted, some people may not find this numerical breakdown abhorrent, but the disparities are at least surprising. Now I’m not going to invoke the staple ten-people-and-a-pie analogy, but I think illustrating the point with food is a pretty good metaphorical choice for impressing upon an audience just how unfair this breakdown is.

Say you had 100 people and split a stash of 100 cookies amongst them according to the aforementioned proportions. In this scenario, ten people would have 85 cookies amongst them, while the remaining 90 people would get just 15 cookies. Yikes. And think about the guy with forty cookies to himself. He puts cookie monster to shame. (And yes, it’s a guy. Check out the top of a Forbes’ list next time you get a chance.) Worse still, think about the 50 people who would have to split one cookie! That’s right. Fifty people, one cookie. It’d be straight-up Mortal Kombat!

The basic idea is that the world is one of those ridiculous Twix commercials writ large: “Two for me, none for you.” Sure, we have cookie monsters like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who in their magnanimous benevolence opt to toss the rest of the world some crumbs. Be that as it may, the reality is that most of the cookie monsters are not in the business of making trickle-down cookie-nomics an empirical reality, and without a bunch of them onboard, they can only do so much. Besides, it could be argued that even the generous few often retain too much of an asset base in establishing what are sometimes little more than self-serving testaments to their altruism. $30 billion dollars is a lot to give away, Bill, but having more than $50 billion left over in spare change renders your generosity decidedly less noble in gesture.

And this cookie situation is not just a ridiculous thing - it’s downright wrong. I mean, I know that people dismiss such disparities with glib like, “Rich people worked hard and deserve every penny.” Good. You’re right. You can stop reading now, Johnny Apathy and Donny Dense. For the rest of you, consider that your lot - and your riches — often come down to blind luck. As the logic goes, a sizable majority of one’s wealth can be attributed to social capital more than anything else. Luck of the draw, you’re born American and voila! Your life chances are already through the roof. (There are plenty of qualifiers to that characterization, but the basic point is clear.) Actually, this isn’t just some conventional wisdom. The purveyors of this idea are Nobel Prize-winning economist H. Simon, and perhaps more tellingly, Warren Buffet himself.

There’s also the argument that the developed world, which boasts most of the top decile of wealthy individuals, accrues wealth at the expense of poor and developing nations—an argument evidenced by, say, US and European agricultural subsidies, or the willingness of US administrations and corporations to deal with corrupt or undemocratic governments for the sake of profit and interest. These ideas, and the fact that the income and wealth gaps are only widening, thoroughly frustrate justifications of the status quo based on the idea that the wealthy have earned their hoards deservedly and single-handedly.

The obligation to do something more than just squirreling away hoards of gold, then, becomes a little more compelling for the wealthy of the world—at least, I would hope so. So many systemic and historically persistent social and economic ills have severely constrained the extent of human possibility, and with such a top-heavy resource distribution, why not lob a few more cookies at the problems, cookie monsters? Cookie monsters, let it be known, include adults with $61,000 or more in assets. Bill Gates and his foundation, for instance, have been credited with single-handedly reconfiguring the economic incentive landscape of the health care and pharmaceutical industries. Offer up enough $750 million and $1 billion grants for HIV/AIDS research, and before too long, someone may just have reason to find a cure.

We are in an era where we have seen not only a retrenchment of the welfare state specifically, but more generally, an insidious de-legitimation of the role that governments are allowed to play in mitigating and ameliorating these ills. The need for these super-wealthy individuals to step in as stop-gaps, accordingly, has become even greater. Fine, I’ll concede that the politics of redistribution are a bit controversial in today’s “I Heart Neoliberalism” society. But one cookie for 50 people? Now that ain’t right.

And have you seen how crazy Britney Spears and Michael Jackson are looking these days? Or Bill Gates, for that matter?Who wants to be a bazillionaire anyways? Besides, me, I never could eat more than a few cookies.

Note to gullible rich people: If any of you want to commence their philanthropic streak right away, I’d be down with an even million, too. Just a thought.

Yoshi is a senior. You can reach him at ajohnso1@swarthmore.edu

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