Obscene Wealth
Gabriel Zucman is a French-born economist who teaches at California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics. Zucman’s academic specialization is in wealth inequality, using tax data to track the stratification in wealth in the US and the rest of the world. A student of famed inequality expert, Thomas Piketty, he is an important figure in the World Inequality Database.
His most recent findings expose a gross obscenity, a level of wealth inequality in the US that should shame every politician, every mainstream-media commentator, and every cultural influencer who fails to make recognition of this travesty central to his or her message.
Discussed in some detail in an article by Juliet Chung, appearing in the Thursday, April 24 Wall Street Journal, Zucman’s most recent findings draw little attention from the other corporate media.
Zucman claims that the wealth of 19 households in the US grew by one trillion dollars in 2024, more than the GDP of Switzerland. That top 0.00001% of households accounted in 2024 for 1.81% of all the wealth accumulated in the US– nearly 2% of all US wealth is held by those 19 households.
Other conclusions drawn from the WSJ article:
● Total US wealth in 2024 was $148 trillion.
● The share of total US wealth held by the 0.00001% of households was, by far, the greatest since 1913, when the US income tax system originated.
● JP Morgan Chase estimates that there were 2,000 billionaires in the US in 2024; 975 in 2021.
● The top 0.1% of households constitute approximately 133,000 households and each holds an average of $46.3 million in wealth, accumulating $3.4 million a year since 1990 (Steven Frazzari, Washington University, St. Louis).
● The next 0.9% of households– approximately 1.2 million households– were each worth $11.2 million and grew by $450,000 per year in the same period (Frazzari).
● The cumulative 1% of households account for 34.8% of total US wealth in 2023.
● In capitalist counterpart countries, the 1% account for 21.3% of the total wealth in the British Isles, 27.2% in France, and 27.6% in Germany (2023).
● The top 10% of US households hold 67% of all the wealth in the US.
● The top half of US households have secured 97% of all US wealth.
● CONSEQUENTLY, THE OTHER HALF OF US HOUSEHOLDS (~ 66 MILLION HOUSEHOLDS, ~166 MILLION CITIZENS) SHARED ONLY 3% OF ALL THE WEALTH ACCUMULATED IN THE US.
These data underscore the fact that the US is a radically unequal society, with wealth concentration increasing dramatically as one ascends the class ladder.
What conclusions can we draw from the Zucman/Wall Street Journal report?
First, it is important to distinguish wealth inequality from income inequality.
Income inequality is a snapshot of the remuneration that an individual or household might receive in a given period. For example, a sports figure or a celebrity might receive a huge compensation package for two or three years of success, but otherwise fall dramatically in income and end with modest wealth.
Wealth on the other hand, is inheritable and cumulative. In a capitalist society, it is possible to have income without accumulating wealth, but it is almost impossible to have wealth without effortlessly gaining income.
Among the employed, income is always contingent. Wealth, to the contrary, is owned and can only be alienated by legal action.
While income is empowering, accumulated wealth imbues its owner with both security and degrees of power and influence proportionate to its quantity.
Thus, wealth is a better measure of personal or household economic status than income.
For those academics and media pundits who prattle on about “our democracy,” it must be pointed out that over half of the US population is effectively economically disenfranchised from the political system. With so little accumulated wealth (3% of the total wealth), they cannot participate meaningfully in an electoral system driven by money. They lack the means to contend for office, as well as to affect the choice of candidates or the outcomes.
Even if the bottom half of households were to pool their resources, they could not match the financial assets readily available to the top 1% in order to dominate political power.
Cold War intellectuals constantly heralded the formal democracy– the rights to participate in electoral politics– enjoyed by citizens in the advanced capitalist countries. They assiduously avoided mentioning citizens’ actual means to participate in any meaningful way, influenced by the vast and telling inequalities in those means. Clearly, the bottom half of all US households have little means of engagement with politics, apart from casting an occasional vote for limited options, for which they have little say in determining.
Further, the next 40% of households have between them, in diminishing amounts as they approach the bottom half, just 30% of US wealth to express their political prerogatives. No doubt that provides the false sense of political empowerment that the two bourgeois parties prey upon.
The victory of form-over-substance in the legitimation of US social and political institutions is surely threatened by the reality of wealth inequality– a reality that empowers the wealthy over the rest.
The fact that the top 10% of US households have a grip on 67% of the wealth makes a mockery of “our democracy.”
Talk of “oligarchs” or “the 1%” — so popular with slippery politicians or internet naïfs — actually masks the rot behind our grossly unequal society. Neither “evil” nor “greedy” people can explain the travesty recorded by the Zucman data.
Instead, it is a system that produces and reproduces wealth inequality. While wars, economic crises, or the militant action of workers and their allies may temporarily slow or set back the march of wealth inequality under capitalism, the system continues to regenerate wealth inequality. That system is called “capitalism.”
As Paul Sweezy explained most clearly:
The essence of capitalism is the self-expansion of capital, which takes place through the production and capitalization of surplus value. Production of surplus value in turn is the function of the proletariat, i.e., the class of wage earners who own no means of production and can live only by the sale of their labor power. Since the proletariat produces for capital and not for the satisfaction of its own needs, it follows that capitalism, in Marx’s words, “establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital.” The Transition to Socialism, lecture, 1971
Economic historians like Piketty and Zucman who carefully track the trajectory of capitalism demonstrate empirically, again and again, that capitalist socio-economic relations give rise to economic inequality.
While the distribution of wealth in advanced capitalist countries is not captured perfectly by the Marxist class distinctions, class-as-ownership-of-capital goes far to explain how wealth is distributed.
With two-thirds of all wealth concentrated in the top 10% of households and an estimated 89% of all capital-as-stocks held by that same 10%, it seems reasonable to conclude that the capitalist class resides within the top 10% of wealthy households.
It should be just as clear that the bottom 50%– with 3% of the wealth, and nearly all of that in personal real estate and other personal property– survives on income from some form of compensation; its members work for a living.
Thus, as one might anticipate from reading the 1848 Communist Manifesto, capitalist society today– 177 years later– remains substantially divided between those who create the wealth by working for a living and those who own the means of wealth creation and, therefore, gain most of their wealth from that ownership. Capital– whether it coalesces as factories, banks, or other enterprises– concentrates wealth at the top.
Between the bottom 50% and the top 10% of households is a contested field of largely income earners– workers– as well as professional, self-employed, and small business owners. While most are, strictly speaking, working class, many have illusions about their class status (“middle class”) or harbor the illusion that their class status will improve.
Some have been characterized as “aristocrats of labor” because of their relatively elevated possession of income or wealth among workers. Others are even better characterized– to follow Marx– as “petty-bourgeois”: small, insignificant capitalists.
From the classical texts through Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas to Soviet analyst S. N. Nadel, Marxism has yet to produce a robust and rigorous theory of the upper-middle strata, though their members often prove to be the pivotal factor in denying social change. Accordingly, it is the segment most intensely courted by the centrist political parties.
If we are to remove the stain of wealth inequality, it must be its sufferers– the working class– who assume that task. And that task will only be decisively accomplished with the replacement of capitalism with socialism.
The Obscenity of Obscene Wealth Close to Obscene Famine
Photo by Joe Pregadio
Television news reports recently showed two different worlds at almost the same time. A $600 billion commitment to invest in the United States, $142 billion sales of arms, and a $400 million luxury jet. Such were part of the bounty in Donald Trump’s monarchical tour in the Middle East. But while DJT hobnobbed and made self-proclaimed deals totalling trillions in the oil rich capitals of Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi, almost concurrent reports showed starving Palestinians as Israel continues to block desperately needed aid from entering Gaza.
The difference between Trump’s high-end luxury tour and the situation in Gaza is startling. The distance from Riyadh to Gaza is 882 miles; Doha to Gaza 1120 miles; Abu Dhabi to Gaza 1400 miles (All distances are in flight miles.). But no physical measurement can accurately portray the distances between the three capitals and what is transpiring in Gaza. While the 47th U.S. president luxuriated among the world’s wealthiest leaders seeing how he could monetarise his presidency for himself and his family, the ostentatious display of economic “deals” was obscene considering what was taking place roughly one thousand miles away in another obscenity.
How to reconcile the ostentatious displays of wealth and power with those who are starving so close by. (I will get to another situation of starvation later.)
Deals and transactional politics are part of Trump’s modus vivendi. Newly elected presidents traditionally begin their terms visiting allies and neighbors. Trump couldn’t resist being fawned over and raking in money by traveling to the Middle East. He became the first U.S. president to make the Middle East his first foreign destination, doing it twice, having visited Saudi Arabia on May 20-21, 2017. “The last four days have been truly amazing,” Trump said after his recent visit. “Nobody’s treated like that,” he boasted to reporters on Air Force One returning to Washington.
The differences between Trump’s extravagant whirlwind tour and the situation in Gaza needs historical perspective. First, Trump did not visit Israel during his recent tour to argue for or insist on Israel’s opening access to aid. Second, not so long ago the idea of the Right to Development was very much on the international agenda. As the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently noted:
“Over thirty years ago, the Declaration on the Right to Development broke new ground in the universal struggle for greater human dignity, freedom, equality and justice… It demanded equal opportunities, and the equitable distribution of economic resources – including for people who are traditionally disempowered and excluded from development.” (Italics added)
The Declaration on the Right to Development was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in a 1986 resolution. (The United States was the only state to vote against the resolution.) The “Right to Development” and the 1974 New International Economic Order (NIEO) called for greater economic equality through the equitable distribution of economic resources.
What makes the Trump tour so impressive is how the Middle East leaders’ wealth attracted the president. Human rights and international solidarity were not on his agenda. The tour’s art of the deal was all about money; no right to development, no NIEO, no equitable distribution of economic resources, no help for the people of Gaza. Melvin Goodman perceptively called the Middle East “Trump’s favorite shopping mall.”
Gaza is not the only current obscenity. Riyadh to Sudan is 1200 miles; Doha to Sudan is 1400 miles; Abu Dhabi to Sudan is 1200 miles. Sudan is now considered the world’s most disastrous humanitarian crisis. A March 2025 statement from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported:
“Sudan is facing the most severe hunger crisis in the world: nearly 25 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, with close to nine million in emergency and catastrophic levels of hunger. One in every two Sudanese is struggling to put food on the table, and people are already succumbing to hunger.”
(For those interested in domestic United States income disparities, a Robin Hood Foundation’s Poverty Tracker in New York City 2025 report showed that that of the 2.02 million New Yorkers now living in poverty, 1.6 million are adults and 420,000 are children. In comparison, in the 2024 edition of the World’s Wealthiest Cities Report by Henley & Partners and New World Wealth, New York City remained the world’s wealthiest city with 349,500 millionaires, 744 centi-millionaires (with investable wealth over $100m), and 60 billionaires. That’s all in the same city with no 1000 mile separation.)
A superficial reading of the above might suggest that I am asking the Middle East monarchs to use their vast wealth to help the most vulnerable, such as in Gaza (if possible) or Sudan. With the United States and other Western countries cutting back on foreign aid, one could hope that the oil rich countries would use some of their new-found wealth to replace the reduced contributions of traditional Western donors.
The Western donors have been by far the major humanitarian donors. The U.S. provided roughly 40% of all U.N. humanitarian aid in 2024. “Together, the U.S., Germany, the European Union and the United Kingdom account for nearly 65% of global humanitarian assistance,” Dorian Burkhalter wrote in Swissinfo. “The Trump administration’s decision to slash 83% of programmes run by USAID – the U.S. government’s main aid agency – has further accelerated a broader decline in funding from traditional donors,” Dorian Burkhalter added.
A report by the Geneva Policy Outlook on Paying for Multilateralism 2013-2023, noted that; “The top 15 donors account for over 86% of all contributions received by the 21 institutions studied [in Geneva]. This donor group is composed of Western governments, the EU, the UN, and the Gates Foundation.”
And the wealthy Middle East countries as donors? Will they replace the traditional Western ones? “Gulf nations – particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE – have in recent years become regular top-ten contributors to UN humanitarian agencies,” Burkhalter observed. “But their funding is mostly allocated to countries of the Arab League.”
As for the future, it may be that China, through its Belt and Silk Road Initiative, may become a major donor. For the moment, the newly wealthy states of the Middle East have shown little desire to replace traditional Western donors on a global scale.
What cannot be denied is that Trump’s wealth meetings highlighted the obscene differences between the global haves and have nots. Whatever or whoever works to diminish those differences needs to move quickly. The starving in Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere need immediate help. Hundreds of billions of dollars in non-humanitarian business deals in the face of millions starving is obscene. And one doesn’t need formal U.N. programs, resolutions or declarations to see that and to try to fix it. The distances between the global super-rich and the impoverished are more than mere measurable miles; and they are obscene.
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