Implications of the Biocultural Ethic for Earth Stewardship - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 122

Box 9.1. Mapping World Plutocracy
Fig. 9.2 The world's billionaires map (Figure reprinted from Hennig and Dorling ( 2013 ,
p. 38), courtesy of John Wiley and Sons)
The wealth distribution shown in the above world map depicts the geographi-
cal area of each country multiplied by a factor associated with the country's
number of billionaires as reported by Forbes magazine on March 7, 2012. Alaska
looks very large in this map because it is transformed in one piece with the rest
of the USA - although, it is likely to be much smaller in terms of its share of the
billionaires within the country. According to Henning and Dorling ( 2013 , p. 38),
in 2012 “there were 1153 billionaires across the globe (this fi gure includes fami-
lies, but excludes fortunes dispersed across large families where the average
wealth per person is below a billion). The total wealth of the billionaires was
US$3.7 trillion - as great as the annual gross domestic product of Germany. Top
of this league table is the US with 424 billionaires, followed by Russia (96) and
China (95).” Henning and Dorling ( 2013 , p. 38), underline that “much of the
wealth of billionaires is held offshore and their wealth is the tip of an iceberg of
hard-to-tax personal assets. In a Tax Justice Network report, James Henry esti-
mated the overall global offshore fi nancial assets held by the world's richest to be
between US$21 trillion and US$32 trillion (out of the total global wealth, esti-
mated at US$231 trillion). Nearly half of these offshore assets are owned by the
world's richest 91,000, just 0.001 % of the global population.”
The map at the bottom left modifi es the map on the top by considering only
the number of women billionaires, who represent less that 10 % of the world's
billionaires. Countries are shaded by the same colors in top and bottom left
world maps to allow visual comparison between the sizes of total billionaires
versus female billionaires. The map at the bottom right depicts the proportion
of non-billionaire people per billionaire in each country; e.g., in the USA one
(continued)