> so that massive wealth has a tendency to be distributed throughout the population rather than concentrating in few hands
If you look at the data, i think you'll find that billionaires own a very small proportion of all wealth
If you look at the data, i think you'll find that billionaires own a very small proportion of all wealth
To pick an extreme and unlikely hypothesis, it could be that if there weren't any billionaires corrupting politics, then the economy would be run in a better way which enabled everyone to become millionaires.
Allegedly about 2100 billionaires - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires
A couple of years ago all the millionaires put together controlled about 45% of global wealth - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/global-wealth-concentration...
Since billionaires are a subset of those, then they cannot possibly control any more than 45%, so certainly less than half.
Can't find a source showing just billionaires, at the moment, but the first source suggests that the billionaires have a net worth on the order of 9 to 10 trillion; if billionaires control 10 trillion, and about 130 trillion is 45% of the wealth, then billionaires are in control of somewhere around 4% of global wealth.
As a rough calculation in sixty seconds, this does appear to support your assertion that billionaires control a small proportion of wealth. If you team them up with all the millionaires, they're up to almost 50%, but just the billionaires on their own; not so much.
Another angle is that Jeff Bezos, richest man in the world, has $184B. That's $550 per American, or $24 per human.
Undeniably a lot of money, but also far from a sum that would change the world if it got redistributed.
There are 19 million millionaires in the US, or 5-6% of the population.
Hhttps://spendmenot.com/blog/what-percentage-of-americans-are...