Against Inequality

"Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the richest person in the world, currently possesses $270 billion dollars. An average American worker would have to work for seven-and-a-half million years to earn this much. To put the matter the other way round, the total amount of money that a typical American will earn in their whole life - after, say, forty years of work - is the same as would be earned by Musk in just fourteen minutes. During the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, 250,000 Americans died and 20 million lost their jobs in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, yet the country's 614 billionaires saw their wealth actually increase by a third, from $2.95 trillion to almost $4 trillion (Manjoo, 2020). Across the world, the richest eight individuals possess the same amount of wealth as half the entire planet - three and a half billion people (Oxfam, 2017). Never across the entire expanse of human history has such a level of inequality been seen before"--