Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/12/property-speculation-pays.html
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Frankly, they are punching under their weight class. China’s 1% hold 43.8% of their country’s wealth, which is above the UK at 29.9% and the US at 42.1%, but well below Russia’s 74.5% and India/Thailand who are the only other two countries above 50%. Those three are far enough above average in wealth distribution and/or population that the world average is 50.8% of wealth among the wealthiest 1%. All of this and more is in Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Databook.
More interesting to me from that dataset is that there are ~33 million individuals with net worth over $1 million USD. Over 40% of them are Americans.
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That’s not 1% — that’s 1/7,000th of 1%.
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Not 1%. 1% of china is about 20% the population of the UK. Combined with the in-comparability of GDP and net worth, this wouldn’t be particularly interesting.
But the actual article is about ~2000 people. That the top 0.0002%.
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You are comparing a stock and a flow.
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Yeah, the Boing Boing headline really understates things. The population of the UK is something less that 5% of China’s. And you’re comparing ANNUAL production to ACCUMULATED wealth. And accumulated wealth tends to be even more concentrated than incomes.
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Communism is amazingly profitable!
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In other comparisons that don’t tell us much, the amount of money held by China’s wealthiest is higher than the average highway speed limits of the United States, New Zealand, and South Africa combined.
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Indeed. How does the wealth of the richest 1% of the UK compare to the GDP of the UK?
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But, ironically, only for the bourgeoisie.
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I feel like they’ve kind of gone past communism and into a kind of imperial court without the emperor. Like when they’d have one of those opium smoking emperors and all the eunuchs are running things in the background, except you get to keep your balls, which is nice.
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Compare with “Tsar” Joseph Stalin.
Actually, did any Marxist-Leninist states ever get past state capitalism (as described by Lenin in 1918)? Lots of countries went backwards, but did any move forwards?
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I believe his preferred honorific was comrade Stalin, so everybody knew he was a just a humble man of the people who happened to have the ability to torture and execute your entire extended family on a whim.
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Remember that this is the listing for publicly known assets.
Mercury only knows how much they’ve hidden away, probably to be lost to time and tide.
I wanted to point out that the units don’t match but I like how you put it.
UK GDP 2.619 trillion USD
Total wealth 14.15 trillion USD
Estimate of % of wealth held by UK 1% varies from 13% to 24%, which works out to 1.8 trillion to 3.3 trillion USD.
For some reason this reminded me of the other post/thread about separatism; it mentioned a City of London separated from the rest of Britain.
How about China’s 1% bankrolls that? They could have something like a reverse Hong Kong.
The City of London wants a modern day Hanseatic League, which I expect will be too independent for China’s liking who will want somewhere they can control.
Neither option is desirable.
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