Manufactured Equilibrium: Sustaining Society through Wealth Concentration and Self-Destruction

Earth's population is seven billion and climbing. At the same time, we’re directly borrowing the future half of earth’s resources later needed to sustain society now. At the moment, we consider this to be credible behavior, but is it? The U.N. calculates that “the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000 and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.” Our manufactured equilibrium doesn’t even work for 51% of the people—a percentage strong enough in a democracy to enact legislation. It would then be reasonable to assume that if the world staged a vote on putting into practice today’s system—the people knowing exactly where their place would be in society, it is not far-fetched nearly six billion people might vote against it.