TrueValueMetrics ... Impact Accounting for the 21st Century

Date: 2024-11-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php L0700-XR-Inequality

EXISTENTIAL RISKS
INEQUALITY
The greedy are running the world ... Whatever happened to 'Noblesse Oblige!?

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			INEQUALITY A problem that has been growing for about 4 decades ... and ignored for all this time. Rich 'successful' people are responsible for this and will not do anything about it.
Obscene Wealth	Terrible Poverty	Neighbors

Inequality in the US
For the period from 1980 to 2015, the bottom 50% of the US population has shared less and less of the total GDP while the top 50% has been increasing its share.

WHY IS THERE INEQUALITY?

WHY IS THERE INEQUALITY?
It really is quite simple.
The people at the top are getting paid too much, and the people at the bottom are being paid too little

WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?
This is not rocket science!
People at the top should be paid much less, and everyone eles should be paid a lot more

WHY DOESN'T THAT HAPPEN?
People at the top make all the decisions about pay ... and this solution does not maximize wealth for the people at the top, so it never gets done!

BUT THIS HAS TO HAPPEN
Sooner rather than later ... people at the top must be held accountable for the decisions that they make, and especially the decisions that are self serving making themselves wealthy and leaving the rest of society struggling.

Business leadership has a singular focus on investors, and keeping them satisfied. That means more and more profit and an ever increasing stock valuation.

Political leadership has a singular focus on staying elected, and this requires being subservient to those that fund political campaigns.

And this is the result.

There have been no substantial initiatives to improve the lot of the ordinary person in the middle of society for something like 40 years ... essentially since the political arrival of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

EXCESSIVE EXECUTIVE REMUNERATION
'The Money Takers'

GO TOP

IPS-Executive-Excess-2015-Money-To-Burn
A 32 page report of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)
Key Findings
Insulated from the real costs of the climate degradation they help create, fossil fuel executives are enjoying stratospheric pay.
Beating the S&P 500 average: CEOs of the 30 largest U.S. publicly held oil, gas, and coal companies averaged $14.7 million in total 2014 compensation, over 9 percent more than the $13.5 million S&P 500 CEO average. The top executives at ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips each earned more than twice the S&P 500 average.
Five years, $6 billion: The management teams of America’s top 30 fossil fuel giants — the CEO, CFO, and next three highest-paid officers of each company — have together taken home nearly $6 billion over the past five years.

Report of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)
'http://truevaluemetrics.org/DBpdfs/Initiatives/IPS/IPS-Executive-Excess-2015-Money-To-Burn.pdf'

Open PDF ... IPS-Executive-Excess-2015-Money-To-Burn

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In many cities around the world there is obscene poverty in close proximity to amazing wealth. It seems that there is more and more poverty at the same time that there is more and more wealth. This is an unstable and unsustainable state of affairs, but there is little evidence that the world's leadership has any appetite for addressing the problem in a coherent and comprehensive manner.

The state of US inequality - 2012
The following graphic is from YES Magazine which adapted it from Hedrick Smith's book 'Who Stole the American Dream?'