Serhan Calba
@serhancalba
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341 okur puanı
Ekim 2017 tarihinde katıldı
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iPhone, that could comfortably fit in your pocket and cost around $500, was 412 times faster than the early mainframes, which were so huge they had their own rooms and cost millions of dollars. The latest iPhone is 3,100 times faster than the early mainframes*!
In contrast, consider the S&P 500, already an insanely small group of 500 companies that could easily be renamed the S&P 67 because 67 companies are responsible for 85 per cent of the returns in the S&P 500. And even within those 67 companies, just seven companies are responsible for most of that 85 per cent return. By the end of 2023 the S&P 500 was up 21 per cent for the year but without these seven companies, known as the Magnificent Seven on Wall Street, the gains would have been just 6 per cent*. The whole system is therefore driven by a tiny handful of extremely successful companies at the top and that’s not conducive to distributed financial growth.
We are now reaching a point of redistribution or revolution – perhaps both. In the brilliant book, The Lessons of History, authors Will and Ariel Durant conclude that while the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, it is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution.
We currently live in a world of the working poor and escalating levels of inequality. The World Inequality Report (2022) describes how Global wealth inequalities are even more pronounced than income inequalities. The poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all, possessing just 2 percent of the total. In contrast, the richest 10 percent of the global population own 76 percent of all wealth*. A handful of individuals are wealthier than billions of people! There are 2,640 billionaires (2023) in the world, 735 in the US, and we will probably see the world’s first trillionaire in our lifetime, all while huge swaths of the global population are struggling to make ends meet. Apart from being morally questionable, inequality doesn’t foster growth and prosperity. Even the IMF has stated that inequality is damaging for economic growth
Study after study has shown that tax cuts for wealthy corporations do nothing for the underlying strength of the economy and simply make the already rich, richer. For example, the London School of Economics studied the fiscal policies in eighteen countries over fifty years and concluded that tax cuts for the rich have never trickled down and only benefit those directly affected*.
The last time this approach was tried in the UK was September 2022 when then Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, under the ‘leadership’ of Prime Minister Liz Truss, announced a ‘growth plan’ mini-budget that included £45 billion of unfunded tax cuts. It was disastrous for the UK economy. Sterling plummeted. The Bank of England was forced into the emergency purchase of government bonds to stabilise the pension market. And it triggered a rise in interest rates to levels not seen since 2008. Both Kwarteng and Truss were ousted, with Truss becoming the shortest serving prime minister in UK history*.
Today we are in the 4th Industrial Revolution, characterised by the integration of digital technologies from AI, machine learning and gene editing to advanced robotics and the Internet of Things (IoT). The concept of the 4th Industrial Revolution is still evolving, but it represents the ongoing fusion of technologies, blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological world and is already shaping the way people live and work.