.png){kind=small}
The super wealthy
“If you saw a monkey hoarding more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When a human does it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.” -Nathalie Robin
Just how rich are they?
In the UK, the richest 1% of Britons now have more wealth than the bottom 70% of the population combined. And the richest 6 people own as much as the poorest 13 million
​
However, even the “the 1%” are not the problem. The richest 1% of Britons have an average wealth of around £3.6 million. But this pales comparison to what the real super-wealthy own.
​
As of 2024, there are 55 billionaires in the UK with a collective wealth just short of £700,000,000,000. Between 2020 and 2022, billionaire wealth increased by £150 billion.
Globally, there are 2781 billionaires, up 26 from the year before and a total increase of $700 billion. All of the world’s billionaires younger than 30 inherited their wealth (i.e. none of them are self-made). In the next 20 years, it is expected that around 1000 billionaires will pass down around $5,2 trillion in wealth.
In recent years, wealth has become increasingly concentrated. Since 2020, the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes. During the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer.
​
The real richest, just a few hundred people, have levels of wealth that is almost impossible to comprehend. To understand the extent of this problem, we must grasp the size of numbers we're talking about.
If you earn minimum wage, it would take 70,000 years to get £1 billion
​
If you were to earn £1 per second, you’d be a millionaire in 11 days. It would take you 32 years to become a billionaire.
But remember, most billionaires have more than one billion. Here's what the richest people in the UK have in 2024, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.
For comparison, the average UK worker makes £33,000 per year. They would have to work for over 1 million years, without spending a penny, to get to the wealth of the UK's richest family.
​
England's highest paid footballer, Man City's Kevin De Bruyne, earns around £400,000 per week. He would need to play, at his level, for almost 1700 years to get to the top of the UK Rich List.
How the rich get rich
The majority of people earn a wage through working, i.e selling time for money. The more skilled you are (in theory) the more you can charge for your time. And this includes the highest earners, like the super-rich footballers. But as soon as we stop working, we stop getting paid.
​
The elite level of super rich don't make their money trading time for money. And because they earn money differently, they're also taxed differently, allowing them to keep more of what they earn.
​
These below types of income do not include inheritance, which the rich can also avoid paying tax on.
Passive Income
​
Passive income is where you are not directly trading time for money. Examples include:
-
rental income from a property
-
interest on your savings
-
profit from a business that employees run for you
-
stock portfolio increasing in value
Not everyone who has passive income is a billionaire, of course, but nobody has ever become a billionaire through a salary alone. The obvious aspect of passive income is that you need to have assets from which to make money e.g. a spare house to rent, savings to invest in the stock market
​
Moving money about
Some, like former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, make money through moving money from one place to another, i.e. trading in the stock market. This is a unique type of super rich. They aren't "business people" and often have never run a business. They don't create anything.
​
As this Guardian article says “[investment banker] primary aim is to make profits from [financial markets], regardless of how it affects the real economy, the national interest or employees. If that means shorting the pound or breaking up a successful company for quick profits, then so be it.”
When crisis hits, the rich make even more money
Every crisis seems to result in yet another transfer of wealth from poorest to richest.
Following the COVID pandemic, billionaires doubled their wealth, and yet more people have lost jobs than at any point in almost 100 years. Globally, billionaires added $5 trillion ($5,000,000,000,000) to their wealth. In the UK, the number of billionaires increased by 20%.
​
While most people are experiencing economic hardship due to the cost of living crisis across 2022 and 2023, private jet sales are on track for a record year.
The Lie: Trickle down economics
Governments have been giving handouts to the wealthy for over 40 years, and the country is less equal than ever. Academic evidence has proven that tax cuts for the rich do not impact economic growth.
This experiment has caused extreme suffering to those that have had to sacrifice to make the rich richer.
But at least the following alone have been collateral damage:
-
The recipients of the 3 million packages from food banks in 2023. Up 50x since the Conservative party gained power in 2010
-
The 330,000 people who have died as a result of Government spending cuts since 2010
-
The 4.2 million children (29% of all UK children) living in poverty - up from 3.6 million in 2010-11
-
The 7.3 million people on NHS waiting list for medical procedures
-
People living in the 500,000 social houses that are not fit for human habitation
-
The 11,000 people in England that were hospitalised with malnutrition between April 2022-23
The UK has immense inequality.
This means that while the UK looks like a rich country on paper, in has become a poor country in which a few very rich people live, which skews the data.
How they spend their money...
The biggest problem with the super-wealthy, however, is that they don't spend their money. They have more money than anyone could spend in several lifetimes and therefore hoard much of it in off shore bank accounts.. Of what they do spend, it's more than just on super yachts and private jets. They use their wealth to influence politics and public opinion through the media.
While the super wealthy claim that they "give back", their philanthropic are tiny portion of their wealth. Society would be better off if they paid the taxes they were supposed to instead.
How they could spend their money...
The ultra wealthy could solve so many of the world's problems and still have more than they could ever conceivably spend. Check out Not The Rich List by the Equality Trust for a comprehensive overview. Here's some examples:
-
Free lunches to all primary school pupils: £1 billion per year
-
Free school meals to all children £2.5 billion per year
-
Abolishing 2 child limit (as of 2023/24): £1.3 billion per year
-
Reduce NHS backlog: £8 billion per year BUT would save £18 billion per year by sorting work absence and mental health improvement​​
