Eating the rich, staying hungry
We investigate the concentration, growth, and nature of wealth to discover the causes of the unrest ravaging the world.
‘When people have nothing to eat, they will eat the rich’.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (attributed)
That everything is going wrong is the only consensus that seems to survive in our time. On everything else, there are today as many positions as there are theories about who is to blame.
Among all of them, one stands out: the argument that wealth has concentrated in very few hands, and that as a result, even as the world keeps growing, a great many people feel an ever-greater sense of scarcity. We are being robbed.
It is a rather extraordinary thing, because translating macroeconomic concepts — such as inequality — into public opinion is very difficult. But years ago the Occupy Wall Street movement produced a slogan that ended up seeping into global common sense to the bone:
“We are the 99%.”
It was the hangover from the 2008 crisis, and the world was hearing in prime time the story of how a handful of bankers had turned the financial system into a casino. They — those men of flesh, bone, and wallet — were to blame for the bubble and the crash. The battle was to be everyone against the 1 percent.
Fifteen years later, the majority of people around the world believe that the accumulation of wealth has a negative effect on society. Major political leaders point to “billionaires” as the architects of the political and social crisis, and the slogan “tax the rich” has become an unlikely artefact of popular culture — one that some candidates have turned into merchandise lines and others have worn to film galas.
Following the success Zohran Mamdani had wielding this argument in his New York mayoral campaign, the British Greens’ candidate Zack Polanski returned to it a few days ago in a video that went viral far beyond the United Kingdom: “When the rest of us work ourselves to the bone to create wealth and almost none of it returns to our communities, it’s going somewhere — upwards, into the pockets of the super-rich.”
The idea that billionaires are to blame for the widespread discontent Polanski describes is a winning argument in this political cycle.
But beyond its undeniable political power, is it actually true? Is the accumulation of wealth responsible for the deterioration in living conditions in recent years? Or have we reached for the easiest target and missed the point?
In other words: is eating the rich enough to fix the world? Or are we going to walk away hungry?
Inside the “1%”.
Like all good stories, this one about the 1 percent contains a measure of truth. In every country there exists a super-wealthy majority that hoards an immense share of global patrimony. In the United States, the wealthiest 1 percent hold almost as much wealth as the poorest 90 percent of the population combined. Across the planet as a whole, the divide between rich and poor countries makes that proportion even more extreme.
But like all good stories, this one also has something of a fairy tale about it. The reality is not a uniform 1 % detached from a uniform society, but a wealth that becomes ever more concentrated as you climb the scale. This means that if you look inside the 1%, you find evidence still more striking: the top 0.1 %of the US population — 342,000 people — hold 14% of the country’s total wealth, half of everything owned by the entire 1 %.
And if you were to look inside that 0.1%, you would find that concentration continues to intensify until it can no longer be captured in a survey. But according to the Forbes list, which studies America’s largest fortunes each year, a third of the wealth of that 0.1%— 6.6 trillion dollars — is in the hands of the 400 richest people in the country. That is to say, 0.00001 percent of the population holds more wealth than the 177 million people who make up the poorest half.
And we could go further. We could look inside the Forbes list and find that of those 400 billionaires, the 10 wealthiest have a combined net worth of 2.4 trillion dollars — a third of the entire list.
Compared to these 10 billionaires, every other American — the 99.99999975 % — is poorer today than they were ten years ago.
The paradox is this: if the goal is to build political majorities, following the same logic as the “99 %,” one could construct a “99.99999975 % coalition.” It would be a grouping of interests that could bring together 342 million Americans alongside the other 390 billionaires on the Forbes list, plus all the millionaires who don’t make the cut, together with all of their staff.
And something considerably more thorny: if we look down the scale rather than up, we find that the population group running from the 1st to the 90th percentile — the 9% sitting between the wealthiest 1% and the poorest 90%, what we might loosely call the “upper-middle class” — owns 37% of total wealth.
Add both groups together — the 1% and the 9% — and the wealthiest 10 percent of the United States holds nearly 70% of the country’s wealth.
And this is not an isolated phenomenon. According to the World Inequality Lab — directed by Thomas Piketty — the wealthiest 10% of the population in each country holds, on average, 73 percent of that country’s wealth.
Three Sad Thirds
A far more productive way of understanding this problem, then, would be the following.
Wealth today divides into three thirds. The wealthiest 1 % takes one; the next 9%— the upper classes, colloquially speaking — captures another; and the following 40%— the middle classes — shares the last of the three. For the remaining 50%, the poorer half of the population, what is left is a pile of debts and scraps.
Societies have become a four-speed world, in which:
A tiny economic elite has emancipated itself from the reality in which the rest of us live. These are the billionaires.
A broader cultural and political elite — the wealthiest 10%— is seeing its relative position improve, and holds interests and levers of power in its hands. These are the lawyers, prosecutors, judges, the corporate world, senior civil servants, some journalists, much of the medical profession, media directors, some university professors, business owners, and some politicians too.
A middle class trapped between the aspiration to climb into the upper class and the fear of falling into the great mass below. These are the schoolteachers and secondary school teachers, nurses, civil servants, police officers, firefighters, some university professors, some journalists.
A working class that has nothing and lives only to pay everyone else. These are the waiters, supermarket cashiers, call centre workers, administrative staff, hospital orderlies, cleaners, carers, delivery drivers, security guards, construction labourers, and taxi and ride-share drivers.
I believe the virtue of this model is that it allows us to understand the problem of wealth distribution in its full complexity, without trying to reduce it to an idea simple enough to fit on a slogan.
I also believe that from this vantage point one can begin to understand the other universal consensus of our time: the one that has formed against political elites. But I do not want to get into that today — I will save it for another piece, which will give you an excellent reason to subscribe to this newsletter and receive it in your inbox in the coming days.
Is the Concentration of Wealth the Cause of the Malaise?
So we all agree that wealth is progressively concentrating toward the upper layers of society. But is that inequality the cause of the widespread discontent being felt around the world?
It is hard to see how, because this is not a recent phenomenon. On the contrary, we have been a three-thirds society for many decades.
Before the Second World War, elites accumulated more than 90% of wealth. Between 1945 and 1975, that concentration fell dramatically — through the effect of the “share issuance” by countries in the form of housing we discussed last week — before rising again between 1980 and 2000. But since 2000, the gap between what different social groups accumulate has been essentially flat. Even as far back as 1980, the wealthiest 10 percent already held 76% of global patrimony. Wealth is very concentrated — but it has been for a very long time.
In the United States, by far the most unequal country in the Western world, the top 1% already owned 23% of wealth in 1989, while the next 9% owned 38%— a figure that remains very similar today, at 36.4%.
The total wealth of the remaining 90% of society was 39.2% in 1989 and is 32.6% today — a difference of fewer than 6 percentage points. Six points that are explained by the outsized growth in the wealth of the 0.1%, which over these 35 years has gone from owning 8.8% to 14% of the country’s wealth.
Do those 6 points justify the galloping contemporary malaise? If we want to believe they do, then we will have to acknowledge another cause that represents a far greater difference.
The Elephant in the Room of the Western World
Over the past 35 years, total wealth has grown exponentially — multiplying eightfold. And what we can observe is that, unlike the concentration of wealth, which is a very ancient occurrence, this explosive growth in the volume of wealth is a recent phenomenon, specific to the last two or three decades — one that has accelerated extraordinarily, first from 2000, and far more dramatically from 2008.
Put another way: wealth is not much more concentrated today than it was 35 years ago. What has happened is that there is simply far more of it.
Of course, this should not be a problem in itself. Growing wealth is the leitmotif of our economic system. It becomes a problem because for decades wealth has been growing faster than the economy.
In the United States, total wealth rose from 20.44 trillion dollars in 1990 to 42 trillion in 2000, reaching 167.7 trillion in 2025. Relative to the economy, Americans’ wealth has grown at twice the speed of GDP. Where in 1990 wealth stood at 3.6 times GDP, by 2025 it is 5.6 times. And wages? Over the same period, the median weekly earnings of full-time workers have grown by only a factor of 2.8.
Across countries as a whole, wealth has gone from representing 3.9 times global GDP in 1980 to 6 times in 2025.
This is the macroeconomic explanation — with all its charts and data — that makes sense of a daily reality everyone understands: economic life is becoming progressively harder for the majority. Because in lived experience, that mountain of wealth materialises as “investment assets” that expect to be remunerated — and that we are obliged to remunerate in many ways: through rent or mortgage payments, through price increases that flow from rising rents and mortgages, through rising share prices. By the same logic, when taxes keep going up, it is because pensioners and public sector workers, like all other citizens, find themselves obliged to service that mass of wealth.
And so we are a society that must devote ever more money and effort to remunerating a growing mountain of wealth. It would be a relief to say that it sits entirely in the hands of a 1 percent, so as to have someone to blame — but the truth is that it makes no difference whose hands it is in.
This is why, even though two adults now work in nearly every household, even though far more money comes into homes than 35 years ago, the perception of scarcity keeps growing. More than that: since everyone can sense that the trend is toward wealth continuing to multiply, most people feel that they are falling further and further behind, that there is no way to keep pace — precisely as Polanski signals in his viral video.
The Global Warming of Wealth
Where does all this “wealth” come from? How is it possible? Is wealth not supposed to be the product of economic activity? Should it not grow in parallel with the economy?
So it should — and so it more or less did, until around 2000. But around that year, the economy stopped growing at the pace it had demonstrated in previous decades. The natural consequence would have been for wealth to stop growing too. But that would have meant ending the dream of infinite growth in which the society of that era was installed — and still is: telling people they were no longer going to become rich, confirming that their children would live worse than they did.
Instead, governments embraced a policy of stimulus-driven reactivation to keep the economy growing. But the economy did not grow again. What happened instead is that wealth emancipated itself from the economy — and for the past twenty-five years it has no longer grown as a product of economic activity, but through the appreciation of assets: specifically, stock markets, which have multiplied in value twenty-fivefold since 1989, and real estate assets, which have appreciated to seven times the value they held at the start of the Federal Reserve’s measurement series.
And here we remain. Policies that normalise the idea of people “investing” or “saving” in housing are the clearest expression of this attempt. In a world that no longer grows, where there are no new industries in which capital makes sense, countries normalise the continued extraction of profit from reselling real estate assets that produce no new value whatsoever.
All of that mountain of artificial “wealth” — paper wealth — is the truly distinctive phenomenon of these last twenty-five years. It is the great elephant in the room of contemporary society. And anyone who genuinely wants to resolve the contemporary malaise — rather than merely win votes by the quickest route — should attend to the causes and mechanisms that produce this runaway and unjustified inflation of wealth.
The reason not many people are willing to do this is that the mountain of wealth has an uncomfortable, difficult-to-confront origin: it is the twentieth-century dream of universal prosperity — the dream we refuse to relinquish — that has brought us to this dead end.
To fix it, what we need is a new dream :D
If you are also searching for a new dream, you can’t miss Hijos del optimismo (Children of Optimism). It is my first book, the older sibling of this newsletter, and a project I have been working on for many years.
You can already order Hijos del Optimismo on Amazon, La Casa del Libro, El Corte Inglés and the publisher’s website, Debate.
You can also read more about me and the story that inspired me to write it
