Expert panel says report on gap in global wealth between rich and poor highlights need for intervention by G20

Expert panel says report on gap in global wealth between rich and poor highlights need for intervention by G20

More than $70tn (£53tn) of inherited wealth will pass down the generations across the world over the next decade, widening inequality and highlighting the need for intervention by the G20 group of leading nations, a group of economists and campaigners have warned.

In a report ahead of the G20 meetings in Johannesburg, hosted by the South African government later this month, the expert panel said the gap in global wealth between rich and poor will widen over the next decade without a permanent monitoring group such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said the report, commissioned by the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, found inequality growing in more than eight in 10 of the world’s countries.

  • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    15 hours ago

    It will be interesting to see if the people that are seemingly some of the most critical of “boomers” are somehow magically any different than prior generations…once history’s largest wealth transfer in history has transpired.

    Knowing human nature, and very critical of the notions commonly bandied about in conversations regarding “generations”, let’s just say I’m very dubious.

    • TonyOstrich@lemmy.world
      2·
      10 hours ago

      Yeah, I doubt it. People talk a big game, but at almost every opportunity they will chose convenience and price despite what they say, and there are few things more convenient than wealth and the ability to use money to make problems go away.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 hours ago

        Yup. The boomers were young and idealist and had heads full of ideas of changing the world and human nature, too.

        My generation (Gen X) watched things like Ronnie Raygun and the excess of the 80s and yuppies and so on, and watching boomers reveling in excess right after the 60s and 70s and a lot of us sneered and said, “look at these sellouts, doing everything The Man told them to do after supposedly rebelling against The Man, we’ll never be like those guys”. Of course, not all boomers and not all Gen X did these things/had these reactions; just talking verrrrry broad strokes here.

        Anyway, the boomers didn’t really seem to course-correct and Gen X, in spite of being called “slackers” and so on, seem to be little different from the trajectory that the boomers went on.

        And I bet I could find similar sentiments about The Lost Generation and The Silent Generation and The Greatest Generation if I were to try to mine information from newspapers and books and magazines of the past.

        I don’t think Gen Y, Gen Z, Alpha, etc…have any magical property that somehow elevates them as a group, either. I suppose if some truly world-shattering human-altering tech comes on the scene, maybe then. Meaning, something in the transhumanist sphere that somehow is used for good to maximize both intelligence and empathy in all of the human population…something akin to The Matrix, but instead of learning Kung Fu, people gain deep insights and have something that shatters the ego (and lasts beyond just peak experiences from MDMA or LSD or the like).