If there were a worldwide redistribution of income today in which every man, woman and child earned the same amount of money, it seems that amount would be be right around $10,000 per year. According to multiple sources (World Bank, IMF, CIA), the total global domestic product is about $70 Trillion per year and we have about 7 Billion people on this earth. If we limited this number to just the 4.5 billion adults wordwide they would each earn $15,555. Now that is income per.
Total wealth is a little harder to measure, but for example the Credit Suisse Total Global Wealth Report for 2011 put that number at about $231 Trillion, and probably not include which means there would be about $33,000 in wealth per person in the World. If we limited that to just the 4.5 trillion adults in the world, they would each possess $51,333.
A recent article by Reuters pointed to a study by the Tax Justice Network where there is about $32 Trillion in hidden or sheltered assets worldwide located in places like Swiss bank accounts and the Cayman Islands for the purpose of tax avoidance. The people who own this money obviously are among the wealthiest people in the world.
On the other end of the spectrum there are places like Haiti where the average person makes $1,200 per year and possesses little or no wealth whatsoever. A country like Congo or Liberia is even worse with the average income per year at $300 per person per year.
Now the bottom 60% of the people in the World according to a United Nations Development Program study make about 5.6% of the total GDP per year. That means that of the 7 billlion people on the earth, 60% or 4.2 Billion of them in total bring in about $4 Trillion or $900 each. To be fair, it would be a little higher per adult, but a common problem in poor countries is they are very young overall compared to developed countries. But no matter how you look at it, 60% of the people in the world make way less than $2000 per year.
Should a government's task ever be to make sure that unproductive people can be made more productive to increase overall productivity and wealth? Do the wealthy sometimes get so good at preserviing wealth, that the overall benefit they provide is increasingly less to everyone else? Can there be methods to bring balance yet preserve capitalism?