Geoscience Reference
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Box 9.1. (continued)
billionaire can be found for every 740,000 people (dark blue), while in India
one billionaire is found amongst every 26 million people (dark red).
In summary these three maps by Henning and Dorling ( 2013 ) depict:
(i) inter-hemispheric inequalities , with a marked bias against the Southern
Hemisphere, (ii) gender inequalities , with a marked bias against females,
and (iii) intra-continental (and intra-country) inequalities , with the largest
wealth gaps in Latin America (especially, Mexico, Colombia, and Chile),
Africa, and Asia, where for each billionaire there are more than 12.5 million
non- billionaire people.
For an Earth stewardship initiative, a main problem derived from an accu-
mulation of power and wealth is its association with a current state of eco-
nomic self-absorption and lack of socio-environmental responsibility. In 2005
three analysts at Citigroup, one of the major investment banking corporations,
generated a report called “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global
Imbalances” (Kapur et al. 2005 ). They began by stating that today “the world
is dividing into two blocks - the plutonomies, where economic growth is
powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest” (Kapur
et al. 2005 , p. 1). They concluded their report by positing that:
We hear so often about “the consumer.” But when we examine the data, there is no
such thing as “the consumer” in the U.S. or UK, or other plutonomy countries. There
are rich consumers, and there are the rest. The rich are getting richer, we have con-
tended, and they dominate consumption. As the rich have been getting richer, so too
stocks associated with the rich have performed exceptionally well. Our Plutonomy
Basket, generated returns of 17.8 % per annum, on average, from 1985. If Plutonomy
continues, which we think it will, if income inequality is allowed to persist and widen,
the plutonomy basket should continue to do very well. (Kapur et al. 2005 , p. 30)
Kapur et al. ( 2005 , 2006 ) have claimed that their plutonomy index outper-
forms the stock market. Noam Chomsky ( 2012 ) has critically analyzed how
plutonomy does so by advancing the idea that money does not just represent
a store of value, a medium of exchange and a unit of accounting, but also the
power to claim the labor of others and natural resources in commodity form.
In terms of the Citigroup analysts:
In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK con-
sumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in num-
ber, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.
There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for
surprisingly small bites of the national pie. Consensus analyses that do not tease out
the profound impact of the plutonomy on spending power, debt loads, savings rates
(and hence current account defi cits), oil price impacts etc., i.e., focus on the “aver-
age” consumer are fl awed from the start. (Kapur et al. 2005 , p. 2)
(continued)
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