Woe! For the billionaires, they cry, have reduced marginally in wealth! Wail! For last year the Sunday Times Rich List showed billionaires had £684bn and this year they have a measley £679bn. For, the Times writes, "it seems the tide is going out and the world’s wealthy are starting to leave."
Lets be very clear: that's not a good response to this! We have all had much worse years than billionaires. We are still trapped in the crises of housing, health, cost of living, and climate that these people created. The tide is pooling round our ankles and lapping at our doors. As our Co-Executive Director Priya Sahni-Nicholas said in the Guardian, "the super-rich have spent centuries diverting wealth into their hands, making our democracy less responsive to people’s needs and damaging our communities."
That's why we wanted to create something that puts the obscene wealth of our super-rich into a proper context. For example: one man in the UK could, right now, end homelessness using just their personal wealth and he'd still have more than £6bn left over. That's insane. So we've created a Rich List that works out exactly what the wealthiest could do if they decided to put their wealth towards the common good.
When people say that we should be relaxed about high wealth, that the richest are good for society, or that we need more of them, we can say definitively that every billionaire choosing not to end homelessness and still keep £6bn is proof that the richest are not helping our society. No wonder polling shows people think the richest 1% of society have more power than the government.
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