Here's some more on thoughts on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch article about inequality that I blogged about here and here.
Globally, the richest 2 percent of adults now own more than half of the personal wealth, says a new study by U.N. researchers. Not only is the bulk of the world's valuables controlled by relatively few people, but those people live in relatively few places: North America, Europe and some nations in the Asia Pacific region.
...nations that are largely capitalistic. It's in these countries where, for the most part, private property is respected and one can choose where to put one's assets (inlcuding one's human capital).
Wealth is created when assets are moved to higher-valued uses. Even if people don't have many assets to begin with, they can still create and build wealth if they are allowed to choose the activities they want to. But in societies where there are few incentives to take risks to acquire wealth through its creation, we have societies of people who are mired in poverty and trememdous resources get poured into wealth acquisition but not wealth creation.
Governments control most of the assets in many African countries. We find frequent clashes between rival factions who want control of the government in those nations ... not because the fighters believe they can improve the lives of citizens, but because that's how they become wealthy: they take it but do not create it. So rather than using resources to produce things the locals want, improving their societies' standard of living incrementally but surely, resources get poured into fighting for government control and, thus, the control of wealth. The winners win. Everyone else loses. It is, at best, a zero-sum game, and wealth inequality is still the name of the game.
Think what could be in these nations if private property and a climate of entrepreneurship (i.e. capitalism) could "take over." Bob Geldoff could take a day off.