Wealth Scales
What does wealth inequality look like?
I have not yet figured out how to make this work on a small screen. For now it only really works on desktop or maybe a landscape tablet.
It is easy to think of millionaires and billionaires as broadly the same thing.
The difference is enormous.
It's so enormous that to illustrate it, you have to keep changing the scale.
The average household net worth in the UK is a bit less than £500k.
The quoted figure is more like £437K but I have rounded up to make the maths easier.
Rounding up rather than down makes the wealth divide appear smaller than in reality.
So there are people with much more than that .. and there are people with much less than that.
What that means is for there to be a millionaire there has to be the equivalent of one household with nothing.
In reality there isn't one household with nothing, the cost is shared, but the point is that for the average net worth to be where it is; for every £1 above the average on one side of the scales there has to be someone with £1 less than the average on the other side of the scales.
The cost of extreme wealth is shared by all of us but what if it was not.
What if the cost of extreme wealth were borne by the fewest possible number of people.
How many people would that take?
A millionaire with £2M is the equivalent of 4 households.
That means for each person with £2M there are 3 households with nothing.
A millionaire with £5M is the equivalent of 10 households.
That means for each person with £5M there are 9 households with nothing.
A millionaire with £100M is the equivalent of 200 households.
That means for each person with £100M there are around 200 households with nothing.
Someone with £1B has the equivalent of 2000 households.
That means for each person with £1B there are almost 2000 households with nothing.
Let's say a tower block is 100 households
(Roughly 2,500 people)
The richest man in the UK has around £35B
That's equivalent to 70,000 households with nothing
(Roughly 175,000 people)
Let's say a town is 100 tower-blocks
Remember that the tower-block was 100 households.
So each of these icons is equivalent to 10,000 households (around 25,000 people).
(Roughly 25,000 people)
(or 10,000 households)
There are around 28M households in the UK
There has to be the equivalent of 3.2M households with nothing to account for those 200 billionaires.
That's more than 10% of the net worth of the UK population.
The average household size is 2.4 people.
I have rounded that to 2.5 again to make the maths simpler.
We'll make the icons represent the same scale again.
One town on the left is 10,000 households.
The cash on the right is 10,000 top 1% households.
According to Oxfam the top 1% of households have a total of £2.8T
Here the rounding handles itself.
1% of households is about 280K households
That's an average of £10M each which is roughly 20 average households (50 people).
So 280K x 20 = 5.6M households or 14M people
It's also worth noting that the total from the 170 billionaires was £683B
That's almost 1/4 of that top 1%.
So of the 700,000 richest people, 1/4 of that money is owned by 170 of them.
(Roughly 14,000,000 people)
£2,800,000,000,000
Around 700,000 people
The cost-of-living crisis, children living in poverty, working families who can't afford food or fuel: These are not consequences of the Russia/Ukraine war, or COVID or immigration.
We are both individually and societally impoverished by a few people's pursuit of wealth.
Were the wealth equally distributed, each household would have that average net worth of close to half a million pounds.
The situation we are in is a consequence of the insatiable pursuit of wealth by the rich.
But to get back to a reasonable standard of life for everyone one we don't need to embrace communism.
We just need to curb the worst excesses of capitalism.
No-one needs to be a billionaire.
There is no-one who can legitimately claim to be worth 5,000 people (2.5 people times 2000 households).
Let alone 175,000 people (£35B).
Rounding
In most cases I've rounded to make these stats more conservative.
There are a few cases where the rounding makes the stats less conservative.
I believe this is adequately balanced by the prior conservative rounding.
I have rounded the average household size up from 2.4 to 2.5 but given the comparisons are with a average household net worth of £500k increased from the real figure of £437K that more than balances the scales.
Using the real figure £1B is equivalent to 2,288 households at 2.4 people which is 5,491 people. Using my figures of £500k and 2.5 people per household this produces the more conservative but round number of 5,000 people.
Stats age
Some of the stats quoted are from a few years ago. The trend has consistently been for the wealth divide to grow and extreme wealth to grow. More recent figures are more likely to show a widening rather than a narrowing of the gap.
As it turns out it is less than my guess which revises the final total down a little.
The average billionaire is worth not the £8B I guessed but more like £4B.