# The 1% owning half the world - has this been true throughout history?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [February 9, 2015, 12:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207 "2015-02-09T12:26:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 12:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/1 "2015-02-09T12:26:11Z")
There’s a lot of brouhaha over here at the moment about the 1% owning half the wealth of the world. But I wonder, has not that pretty much always been the case? Surely wealth has always been concentrated? Remember I’m asking about the whole world, not just the US or UK (which are rather better than that), and over all of history.
For this thread, I’m not interested in debating the rights or wrongs of this state of affairs, just in the factual accuracy. Let’s keep it GQ, please.
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### Author:  [@GusNSpot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GusNSpot)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 12:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/2 "2015-02-09T12:34:28Z")
Not a fact, just IMO.
In the past, before 1900 and after 1700 I don’t think so.
Problem though is knowledge of the total wealth in China affecting the over all wealth distribution.
YMMV
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### Author:  [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 1:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/3 "2015-02-09T13:14:24Z")
Such income/wealth statistics vary greatly by time and place, and are hard to come by, but inequality tended to be very high in ancient kingdoms or feudal societies. Inequality can rise as a result of _either_ an event (e.g. war or depression) that causes great poverty, or an event (e.g. new trade routes or technologies) that causes great wealth; this dichotomy confuses the issue more.
Since few advocate a return to absolute monarchy or feudal conditions, it seems best to compare “apples with apples” and focus on the post-Industrial Western world. (Statistics are hard to come by, so it’s convenient to use income as a proxy for wealth.)
[Here’s an article from _Atlantic Monthly_](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/us-income-inequality-its-worse-today-than-it-was-in-1774/262537/) that may answer some questions. Inequality in the 1774 pre-Industrial U.S. Colonies was much less than in Europe of that time and even slightly less (even with slavery considered!) than it is in the U.S. today.
[This page will show](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States) inequality in the U.S. falling during the Great Depression and World War II (though never falling as low as it was in the early 1920’s before the Roaring Boom), level for three decades, then beginning a long strong rise about 1981. European countries show a similar trend, with the upward push beginning several years after that of the U.S. for many countries, but [coincident with the Thatcher government in the U.K.](http://www.progressorcollapse.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/gini-index-uk.jpg)
Summary: Statistics _do_ show a very significant increase in income and wealth equality in the U.S. starting about 1981.
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### Author:  [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/4 "2015-02-09T16:16:33Z")
> [@septimus](#):
>
> Such income/wealth statistics
Income and wealth are separate matters. One can have a high income and not be wealthy, for example due to high expenditure.
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### Author:  [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/5 "2015-02-09T16:57:40Z")
> [@Quartz](#):
>
> Income and wealth are separate matters. One can have a high income and not be wealthy, for example due to high expenditure.
Or - one can have a lot of wealth - a valuable house for example - and still be poor. There are people living on state benefits in London when their houses are worth over a million GBP.
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### Author:  [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/6 "2015-02-09T17:01:23Z")
> [@septimus](#):
>
> _**(Statistics are hard to come by, so it’s convenient to use income as a proxy for wealth.)**_
> [@Quartz](#):
>
> Income and wealth are separate matters. One can have a high income and not be wealthy, for example due to high expenditure.
Sorry for not bolding the now-bolded disclaimer. Do you have better, wealth-oriented stats? If not, can we avoid diverting the thread into “Stats we _Wish_ we had”?
PS: There is close correlatioon between wealth and income – especially if one’s earning power is considered a form of wealth.
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### Author:  [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/7 "2015-02-09T17:15:26Z")
I don’t think it’s questionable, in somewhat general terms, to say that some small percentage of people have always held some very large percentage of total wealth. You can spend a lot of time arguing whether the proportion was 1 or 2 or 5% of the population holding 90 or 80 or 66% of the wealth, but the generality is true and has always been true for every major society and nation throughout history.
Turn the question over: Do we know, with any reasonable certainty, of a large and stable society in which wealth was more evenly distributed for any meaningful length of time?
(That is, let’s leave out the outliers and flukes: small populations, unusual circumstances and brief periods. Pointing at an isolated Asian culture or the year after the Bolshevik revolution or some such doesn’t tell us much except that the possibilities can go beyond common norms.)
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### Author:  [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/8 "2015-02-09T17:21:21Z")
I think a major complication of this question is that individual ownership of property is far from the only historical model for control of resources. How do you account for forests and grasslands used by hunter-gatherers? What about factories in Communist countries? What about holdings of the Catholic Church in Renaissance Europe?
This last one is, I think, especially interesting. Sure, you could claim that the Pope owns everything, but I don’t think that reasonably accounts for things like the Bible at a rural church, or the jewelry worn by an English bishop, or the stained glass in Notre Dame.
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### Author:  [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/9 "2015-02-09T17:29:41Z")
> [@septimus](#):
>
> Summary: Statistics _do_ show a very significant increase in income and wealth [del]equality[/del] in the U.S. starting about 1981.
:smack: _ **in** _equality
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### Author:  [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/10 "2015-02-09T18:05:31Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#):
>
> I think a major complication of this question is that individual ownership of property is far from the only historical model for control of resources. How do you account for forests and grasslands used by hunter-gatherers? What about factories in Communist countries? What about holdings of the Catholic Church in Renaissance Europe?
It also depends on whether you want to answer the OP’s question in fairly broad strokes, as relevant claims about today’s breakdown of wealth and ownership, or get into some rather deep (and deeply debatable) economic considerations. I think the first would be more useful and appropriate, but that’s just me.
I think it’s a bit absurd to bring proto-civilization times into the discussion. Which of a million roving hunter-gatherers “owned” Africa or North America is a vaguely interesting philosophical question, but doesn’t add much to our understanding of modern ownership and wealth.
The simple answer under Communism is that the state collectively owns everything of scale; individuals have only their personal belongings and scant wealth. The reality was mostly different, but I don’t think any individual, however powerful and privileged, could be said to “own” the Lada factory he ran.
As for the Church… I’d say yes, the stained glass of Notre Dame did “belong to the Pope” as head of the Church. The Church owned it all and I doubt any parish priest would claim otherwise - they might have possession and use of that illuminate bible or elaborate crucifix, but questioned on ultimate ownership - it would be Rome.
All of these are outliers to the discussion, IMHO. Interesting, and framing of the larger concepts, but I think meaningful discussion relevant to the OP’s question has to be limited to the scope of individual ownership and control of community wealth. We have to compare apples to apples to get anywhere (unless this is going to turn into a graduate seminar in the ethics of economics).
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### Author:  [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/11 "2015-02-09T19:02:42Z")
It’s worth keeping in mind that credit has only been freely available to the chattering classes in the last century or so. That means there are lots and lots of people who have “negative” wealth - that is, more debt than assets - which rather skews the numbers.
For example, my wife and I are successful professionals with a combined income of well over $100K. However, we bought a house in 2008 which is now (generously) worth two thirds of what we paid. Despite paying double our mortgage premiums for most of the past six years, it’s _still_ worth less than what we owe. When you factor in my (considerable) student loans and her very small ones, and tot up the value of everything we own, we are probably just about breaking even. That is, we are worth $0 _combined_.
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### Author:  [@hyperspaz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hyperspaz)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/12 "2015-02-09T19:10:51Z")
From what I understand, in hunter/gatherer societies, wealth is equally distributed, and consciously so; i.e., the hunter who actually killed the game is obligated to divide the meat up equally, and if he doesn’t, is socially rejected by the group until he shapes up.
This pattern seems to have changed when agricultural societies developed and it was possible to hoard wealth because you could have more stuff than you could carry. So technically you could say that the 1% pattern has not always been the norm, but certainly it has been since agriculture began to predominate.
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### Author:  [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/13 "2015-02-09T19:16:33Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#):
>
> That is, we are worth $0 _combined_.
That’s okay. We like you anyway. Most of the time. 😃
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### Author:  [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/14 "2015-02-09T19:30:46Z")
Yeah, but imagine how you’d feel if you had to rent me instead of having me thrown in with your SDMB subscription. 😉
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### Author:  [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/15 "2015-02-09T19:49:19Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#):
>
> This last one is, I think, especially interesting. Sure, you could claim that the Pope owns everything, but I don’t think that reasonably accounts for things like the Bible at a rural church, or the jewelry worn by an English bishop, or the stained glass in Notre Dame.
I was just reading about an interesting aspect of this. When Francis of Assisi founded his religious order one of the rules was extreme poverty. Neither the order as a whole nor any member of the order was supposed to own anything beyond what they needed for that day’s use. People admired the Franciscan Order and wanted to support it but Francis refused any gifts larger than a single day’s food.
But after Francis died, some of the subsequent members of the order got together with the Pope and worked out an arrangement. The Pope ruled that the original rule still stood - neither the Franciscan Order nor any Franciscan could own anything of value. But people would now be allowed to donate gifts to the Pope for the Franciscans to use. So you could donate a building or a field or a bag of gold and the Franciscans would _use_ it. But it didn’t count as a violation because they didn’t technically _own_ it.
This legal fiction was maintained for almost eighty years before a later Pope said he would no longer participate in it and gave the Franciscans ownership of all of the property they had been using.
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### Author:  [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/16 "2015-02-09T19:54:23Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#):
>
> The simple answer under Communism is that the state collectively owns everything of scale; individuals have only their personal belongings and scant wealth. The reality was mostly different, but I don’t think any individual, however powerful and privileged, could be said to “own” the Lada factory he ran.
The Germans used this principle against the Soviets during WWII. The existing rules of war said that an invading army could confiscate government property but wasn’t supposed to seize private property.
The Germans claimed they could legally take anything they found in the Soviet Union because the Soviet government had eliminated the concept of private property and all property belonged to the state.
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### Author:  [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2015, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/17 "2015-02-09T22:13:41Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#):
>
> The Germans claimed they could legally take anything they found in the Soviet Union because the Soviet government had eliminated the concept of private property and all property belonged to the state.
Sneaky!
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### Author:  [@get\_lives](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/get_lives)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2015, 3:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/18 "2015-02-10T03:39:41Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#):
>
> Yeah, but imagine how you’d feel if you had to rent me instead of having me thrown in with your SDMB subscription. 😉
Uggh…wait, how hot are you? 😃
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### Author:  [@PastTense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastTense)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2015, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/19 "2015-02-10T06:12:29Z")
Traditionally the substantial majority of the population lived in rural areas and the bulk of a nation’s wealth was in land. This has only changed relatively recently historically speaking (it started changing with the industrial revolution).
So you need to ask who owned the land?
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### Author:  [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2015, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-1-owning-half-the-world-has-this-been-true-throughout-history/712207/20 "2015-02-10T14:55:45Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#):
>
> So you could donate a building or a field or a bag of gold and the Franciscans would _use_ it. But it didn’t count as a violation because they didn’t technically _own_ it.
Ah. The Saint Thomas of Magnum principle. 😃
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