World’s 8 Richest Have as Much Wealth as Bottom Half

Leave it to Oxfam to give you the perfect headline. The concentration of wealth has become so absurd, that the richest 8 people owns as much wealth as the entire bottom 50% of the world.

We are talking about the entire human race here, the rich keep getting richer, and the poor get poorer. Familiar refrain right? But it's getting worse.

Just eight of the richest people on earth own as much combined wealth as half the human race.

While we've done a decent job in the last few decades of lifting people out of poverty, the tech companies and tycoons stand to gain even more in the approaching age of automation.

Many organizations and journalists are worried that platforms like Facebook, with 1.8 Billion users stand to create a system that furthers the control. Facebook's profits more than doubled in the final quarter of 2016.

Companies like Alibaba, that is bigger than Walmart, and Amazon that is scaling to become a trillion dollar company in its own right and a potential leader in artificial intelligence, show the kind of companies that are destined to rule the world.

Inequality, Not Artificial Intelligence, is the Greatest Threat to Humankind

Inequality has moved up the agenda in recent years on our debates, but democracy has failed to create a capitalism that is ethical and ensures the intersection of Silicon Valley, Washington and Wall-street create a future that is in the best interest of American and global citizens.

Companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and now Amazon, have created a society where the concentration of wealth goes against the best interests of the economy.

Digital and the web have been transformed from the promise of greener fields of information and freedom, to a digital highway made for profit that primarily benefits Silicon Valley companies. This is probably the biggest moral dilemma of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

For Fortune 500 companies, CEOs make around 500 times as much as the ordinary employee.

It's hard to see how Silicon Valley would advocate a UBI system that doesn't favor them. Had Bernie Sanders become POTUS and not Trump, do you think as many billionaires would have been given cabinet positions? Bezos (CEO of Amazon) and POTUS may not be the best of friends, but they belong to the same class: the super-elites.

Instead of an economy that works for the prosperity of all, for future generations, and for the planet, we have instead created an economy for the 1% - Oxfam

We Live in an Era of Super-Size Me Capitalism

It was only two years ago when the top 1% of the world control half of all household wealth, now in 2017, it's just these eight people.

I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the British Empire on which the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply. - Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild (1840-1915)

Fast forward to 2017, Amazon will own the retail fulfillment and logistics system and Facebook already owns the data and content system. Google owns search and with YouTube, Alphabet owns the top 2 website in the U.S. according to Alexa rankings data.

We live in an era of monopolies, one where we get most of our news and information from the same few companies. Digital is not some world community that connects the world as Mark Zukerberg's manifesto would have us believe, it might be becoming something far more sinister.

"A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little." - Bernie Sanders

Unfortunately, we live in a world where Billionarres are paying less taxes systemically in a world that favors the rich, in almost every possible way. We have to ask ourselves, is this really the world, and system we want to live in?

I'm a LinkedIn Top Voice, and I write at the intersection of technology, social issues, retail and the future. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

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