The Forbes billionaire list was published in the last week or so.
There are now (according to them) 2781 billionaires, 141 more than last year and 26 more than the overall record.
They suggest that that group of people are worth $14.2 trillion.
The current estimate of the UK wealth is around $12 trillion.
It's a problem, isn't it this huge and massive separation?
If you want to put it into perspective, if you're earning over £45,000 in the United Kingdom, you're in the top 25% of UK earners; if you earn over 65,000, you're in the top 10% of UK earners. That's a massive contrast to somebody who has over a billion dollars.
The problem with such an extraordinary wealth gap is that we start storing more wealth at the top end and less and less at the bottom.
We've been on this track since the 1970s, worse in the 1980s, and then kicked on from there.
Our system for commerce worldwide promotes this extraordinary bubble of wealth at the top end.
Kevin Bridges once said in one of his fantastic sketches, "The problem is not poor people spending money. It's rich people saving money".
This happened, at least in part, because of the shareholder Primacy model, which was introduced in the 1980s by an economist named Milton Friedman, who advised Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
It was off the back of this type of stuff that they started to sell shares in building societies in the United Kingdom, a process known as 'carpet-bagging' where normal people ran fast to get £2000 or £3000 they would never have had and spend it on a holiday, and then they never had it anymore, and then private people owned the banks.
We were happy to run, to rush even to that situation without a view in the longer term, but control of the financial markets and control of capitalism was stripped away from the original model that we had to a new shareholder wins model that everybody rushed towards because they thought it made them a little bit wealthier.
It did make them wealthier.
It did make quite a lot of people wealthier, and we spawned a middle class that we didn't have before: people who owned their own council homes, people who could buy a car, and people who could move up the ladder. My parents were part of that generation.
The difficulty is, though, that when you meet people who earn between £45,000 and £100,000, people who exist in the top parts of the earning scale of the United Kingdom, a lot of them are simply not happy or are pretending to be happy or are actually openly miserable.
What we didn't get for increased wealth was increased happiness that was proven by Gallup, the pollsters who conducted a poll of happiness for people over 60 years ago in the United Kingdom and then repeated it regularly, only to find that as our wealth increased by over 30% our happiness decreased by 30%.
It's a tough model, isn't it?
Society now convinces us that the route to happiness, health, well-being, and all of that is just to earn more money. But nobody really tells us how much is enough or when we can stop the hamster wheel chase to get more and spend a little bit of time on ourselves and a little bit of time on the people that we care about.
Time and time again, I watch people run so hard that they break, step back, and then go again in order to raise a bit more money, a bit more 'safety,' or a bit more security, whatever that might mean.
One of the greatest disciplines that any of us could possibly develop would be the discipline of understanding what is enough.
It doesn't matter if this month's quarter is higher than last month's as long as we have enough.
It doesn't matter what our earnings per share are, it doesn't matter what the bonus is going to be, it only matters that we have enough, enough to keep going, enough to carry on, enough to have a little bit of space in our lives, to wonder and to be curious and to explore things other than making paper and making money.
Blog Post Number - 3768
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