The 1%'s Story

The top one percent of the wealthiest people on the planet own nearly fifty percent of the world's assets while the bottom fifty percent of the global population combined own less than one percent of the world's wealth are the findings of an annual report by the investment firm Credit Suisse —the 2014 Global Wealth Report.
Global wealth has grown to a new record, rising by $20.1 trillion between mid-2013 and mid-2014, an increase of 8.3%, to reach $263 trillion – more than twice the $117 trillion recorded for the year 2000. The bottom half of the global population own less than 1% of total wealth. In sharp contrast, the richest decile hold 87% of the world’s wealth, and the top percentile alone account for 48.2% of global assets.

The richer you are, the richer you become. Equally, the poorer you are, the easier it is to fall further. Investment advisers say that making the first 10 million is the hard part. Once you’ve achieved that, beneficent tax regimes, lawyers and regulators will do the rest. How do people become rich? They do so by fair means but mostly foul, by entrepreneurship, but more by appropriation and inheritance. They make markets and they manipulate them. They defeat the competition; they buy up the opposition or they eliminate it. That is how the robber barons in the mid-late 19th century carved up the steel mills, the railroads and the banks. From the Roman property scammer turned general Marcus Licinius Crassus, to the Malian king Mansa Musa (possibly the richest man in history), via Cosimo de’ Medici and the bankrolling of Renaissance Florence, to the conquistadores and the great American tycoons, the same impulses emerge. Cast forward from them to the contemporary elite – the sheikhs, the geeks, the oligarchs, and the bankers, they follow a familiar path.

In order to consolidate your wealth, you need to buy influence among the political leadership. Identify the power brokers and ensure they are on your side. The German industrialist Alfred Krupp, who would sell anything to anyone, ensured that not just the Kaiser, but also the Shah of Persia and the Emperor of Brazil were impressed by the entertainment on offer at his Villa Hügel. Medici extended a solemn invitation to popes, dukes and rival businessmen to share mass with him in his intimate private chapel at the palazzo that bears his name. The modern-day fundraiser for the president or game of tennis with the prime minister might be seen as the same. The mega-rich employ a well-paid army to look after their brand, to wash away inconvenient facts about their past. Lawyers are hired to slap libel writs; public relations agents massage the message. Crisis PR is a booming business, helping to divert attention from the antics of offspring and gold-diggers. The shadier the road to wealth that is taken, the more determined is the billionaire to become a pillar of the new establishment, emulating the manners and the lifestyles of those who became rich before them. Anyone who is anyone is at Davos, or the Bilderberg conferences, or at a society wedding in the English countryside, preferably with a junior royal in tow. Social success is all but guaranteed. The new elite merges with the established one. Old money was new money once.

In the complex psychology of the super-rich, victimhood is a natural concomitant to entitlement.  Tom Perkins, a Californian tech venture capitalist, described the treatment of the 1% as akin to the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews.  “There was a period of remorse and apology for banks. I think that period needs to be over.”  Bob Diamond of Barclays, ecxuses himself and others ffom culpability.

 By the same token,others possess a sense of innate superiority.  Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, spoke for many of his group when he famously quipped that he was “doing God’s work”. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have come to believe that they are best placed to spend the money that might otherwise have gone into state budgets from taxation. These titans believe that the same brainpower that produced technological invention and financial speculation can be transferred to solving some of the world’s most intractable problems in health and poverty.

 It matters not a jot how they made their money. The 1% all claim to be self-made (the truth is usually less romantic). They display skill, guile and tenacity to get to the top, and they cannot understand why anybody might resent their success. The people who are blamed for the economic crisis and for widening inequality are still living in their parallel worlds, raking in the bonuses, taking their private jets to their private islands, while doling out the odd scrap known as philanthropy. The Super-rich mix with a narrow group of similar-minded people, sparring with each other at the same auctions, fraternising on each other’s yachts. They compare themselves only against each other, leading them often to be dissatisfied with their lot, believing themselves to be not wealthy or powerful enough. They pay as little back to the state in tax as they can get away with. They reinforce each other in their certainties, convinced that their acquisition of wealth, and spending of it through charitable enterprise, has earned them their place at the apex of global decision-making and moral supremacy.



Adapted from here