In 2009, the richest 5 percent [in the United States] claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

This is something that most people seem to either not think about or find quite acceptable, but it isn’t. Let’s just look at the inequality of income by using some simple figures to bring it home. Let’s suppose we had a million people, and a total wealth of a billion dollars. This would make the average wealth $1,000. For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that someone who has $1,000 can get by OK, feeding and clothing themselves and their families. This assumes that their income is by and large proportional to their wealth – not strictly true, but close enough to make little difference to this discussion.

The top 5 percent (i.e. 50,000 people) share $635 million, giving them an average of $12,700 each.  When you think of that as a little over twelve times the average wealth it doesn’t sound excessive – after all, the average guy has $1,000, right?

Wrong, if you mean "the guy in the middle", because averages (in this case the name of the culprit is the arithmetic mean, arrived at by adding all the wealth up and dividing by the number of people) can be very misleading. The fact that an unemployed person and someone earning $100,000 have an “average” income of $50,000 does not make life any easier for the guy who’s getting nothing. The earner has “taken” 100% of the money, and so there is nothing for the unemployed person.

Because the relatively few most wealthy take so much of the pot there is not a whole lot to share among the bottom 80 percent (that’s 800,000 people in our example). If they were all to be averagely wealthy we would need $800 million for them, but in fact they divide up just $128 million. This means that their average wealth would be $160 – just less than a sixth of the average. In other words each of the richest 5 percent of the population has, on average, almost eighty times what each of the poorest 80 percent has.  Of course, now you know what you just learned about averages, you can probably guess that the comparison becomes even more incredible when you compare the top 1 percent, or the top 0.1 percent, of earners with the really impoverished. The ratios become obscene.

What about the fifteen percent in the middle, between our two extremes? Well, simple arithmetic tells us that these 150,000 “middle class” get to share the remaining $237 million, giving them an average of $1,580. They are doing OK, they definitely feel that they are well off, and they can’t understand what the hell the bottom 80% is bitching about. They’d like to move up, to have more, and they feel that there is ample scope for those below them on the ladder to do the same. Alas there is only so much available, and the more that goes to the rich the less there is for the poor. This is why Western civilization is going to hell in a handbasket.

It is fashionable (as it was in the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the two Western leaders of the last half century most transparently disinterested in the people on whose behalf they purported to govern) to suggest that people must look out for themselves, by being industrious. This fashion serves the rich very well, as it allows them to hold on to most of their wealth and pay expensive accountants to work out how to make sure that the IRS (one of the federal government’s major revenue generators) takes as little of their income as possible. But does it not seem that the acquisitive rich are leaving too little of the pie for the poor?

One has to ask of the extremely rich why it is necessary to continue to aggressively accumulate more wealth. Is that really the best way to enjoy wealth? Could one perhaps not more enjoyably take it a little easier, exercise a practical interest in philanthropy; try to do a few more people a bit more good? High earners often like to excuse their incomes by suggesting that the money isn’t really important, it is simply a measure of their success. In which case, are they not perhaps trying to be a little more successful than necessary? If it is only a way of keeping score, it seems we should really find a better way, one that does not lock up huge amounts of resource in the hands of a very few to the detriment of society as a whole.

The latest financial scandals have made it obvious even to people educated in America’s (seventeenth best in the world) school system that government and business are serving the same set of interests, which are not those of the working people. It is said that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. If the wealthy were a little better schooled in history they might remember the French and the Russian Revolutions, both uprisings by the proletariat against a bourgeoisie that was well-fed, prosperous and by and large uncaring about the conditions of their less fortunate fellow men.

People think that history never happens around them, but of course it does: history is simply the more-or-less organized memory of past events. The historical precedents are not good. Already we see signs of Western governments deploying brutally repressive tactics against protestors with legitimate democratic concerns. In the name of the “war against terrorism” both the United Kingdom and the United States have turned back the clock on the civil liberties of their citizenry in a huge way. The forces of repression are massing, and the Obama administration, a dreadful disappointment to a large number who took hope from his election campaign, has proved to be a keen supporter of government repression. How long will it be before these chickens come home to roost?