• It’s no secret there’s inequality across the economy, but a huge new report shows just how much.
• The 2022 World Inequality Report demolishes the myth that tax cuts for the rich will trickle down.
• The bottom half of the global population holds just 2% of all wealth, while the top 10% earns 76%.

Inequality has remained persistently high for decades, and a new report shows just how stark the divide is between the richest and poorest people on the planet. 

The 2022 World Inequality Report, a huge undertaking coordinated by economic and inequality experts Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, was the product of four years of research and produced an unprecedented data set on just how wealth is distributed.

“The world is marked by a very high level of income inequality and an extreme level of wealth inequality,” the authors wrote. 

The data serves as a complete rebuke of the trickle-down economic theory, which posits that cutting taxes on the rich will “trickle down” to those below, with the cuts eventually benefiting everyone. In America, trickle-down was exemplified by President Ronald Reagan’s tax slashes. It’s a theory that persists today, even though most research has shown that 50 years of tax cuts benefits the wealthy and worsens inequality.

The researchers are some of the leading minds on inequality in the entire field of economics. Chancel is the co-director of the World Inequality Lab, while Saez and Zucman have literally written a book on the rich dodging taxes and helped create wealth tax proposals for senators like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Piketty, who was Zucman’s doctoral adviser, wrote the tome “Capital in the 21st Century” which used an unprecedented data set going back to the French Revolution to expose how centuries of growing wealth inequality was a feature of capitalism, not a bug. The World Inequality Report was his effort to do the same for recent history.

They argue in the new report that the last two decades of wealth data show that “inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability.”

For instance, when it comes to wealth, which accounts for the values of assets people hold, researchers found that the “poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all.” That bottom half owns just 2% of total wealth. That means that the top half of the world holds 98% of the world’s wealth, and that gets even more concentrated the wealthier you get.

Indeed, the richest 10% of the world’s population hold 76%, or two-thirds of all wealth. That means the 517 million people who make up the top hold vastly more than the 2.5 billion who make up the bottom. The world’s policy choices have led to wealth trickling up rather than down. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/uIiMY/1/

One group in particular has seen its share of global wealth swell.

Billionaires now hold a 3% share of global wealth, up from 1% in 1995

The report notes that “2020 marked the steepest increase in global billionaires’ share of wealth on record.” Broadly, the number of billionaires rose to a record-number in 2020, with Wealth-X finding that there are now over 3,000 members of the three-comma club. 

Billionaire gains are a well-documented trend: The left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness found that Americans added $2.1 trillion to their wealth during the pandemic, a 70% increase.  

So what could work better than the current system? As the authors note, there’s been a renewed interest in taxing wealth during the pandemic: “It would be completely unreasonable not to ask more to top wealth-holders in the future, especially in light of the social, developmental and environmental challenges ahead.”

For the authors, that means expanding wealth taxes like property taxes to all different types of wealth, and to make taxes progressive — meaning they increase with net worth. The US has seen proposals from leading progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Ron Wyden that would respectively tax billionaire wealth outright, or tax the gains their assets see. But neither is moving forward. Read the original article on Business Insider

In the report (PDF) published in April and unearthed by ZDNet, the Inspector General detailed the flaws it found in five random locations where the Missile Defense Agency installed ballistic missiles as part of the program. One of the most common issues it came across was lax enforcement when it comes to multi-factor authentication.

Apparently, many users/employees who have access to the BMDS’ network in three of the five locations haven’t even switched on multi-factor. Instead, they continue to use only their access cards and passwords for entry. And that’s probably not secure enough, since, you know, the system was designed to launch ballistic missiles in order to intercept enemy nuclear rockets and defend US territories.

The auditors also found that three of the five missile locations didn’t apply patches for vulnerabilities discovered years and years ago, even as far back as 1990.

Last week, the Australian government passed the country’s controversial Access and Assistance Bill 2018 into law, legislation that allows government agencies to demand access to encrypted communications. Companies that don’t comply with the new law could face fines of up to AU$10 million ($7.3 million). A number of companies that stand to be affected have spoken out about the legislation, and Signal has now joined in, explaining that it won’t be able to fulfill such requests if asked.

“By design, Signal does not have a record of your contacts, social graph, conversation list, location, user avatar, user profile name, group memberships, group titles or group avatars,” Signal’s Joshua Lund wrote in a blog post. “The end-to-end encrypted contents of every message and voice/video call are protected by keys that are entirely inaccessible to us.” Lund added that Signal is open source, meaning anyone can “verify or examine the code for each release.” “People often use Signal to share secrets with their friends, but we can’t hide secrets in our software,” he wrote. “We can’t include a backdoor in Signal.”

Ladies… I’m so sorry. This is such a gross part of being a man and something societally, by which I mean we men, need to address and stop. 

• Schweppes commissioned research into how often women are touched by strangers
• A sensor-equipped dress designed by Ogilvy captured the party experience of three women
• The experiment confirms for men what women have known all along

Women get groped A LOT and that’s not at all OK in any way. To be fair, this research was done in a night club where I would assume that number tilt more in favor of groping. At least I would hope that is the case. As a man… holy crap, while I know it happens I hope it’s not as bad in regular life. A nightclub would be more alcohol infused, etc. is all I’m saying… not that a woman wouldn’t run into similar behavior outside of a club. 

The purpose of The Dress for Respect project was to raise awareness of just how pervasive unwanted touching of women is… and judging by this it’s pretty pervasive even if you take into account the location where the test was done (which of course isn’t an excuse in any way… consent means CONSENT). 

To successfully complete their missions, astronauts need to be emotionally and psychologically stable to withstand weightlessness, isolation and other challenges of long space flights. And as surprising as it may seem, NASA’s crew commander Angelo Vermeulen claims that food is absolutely crucial to the psychology of the crew.

The following infographic will take you on a journey through the evolution of food in space, show you the challenges of eating in zero gravity, educate you on space food preparation processes and explain why food is such an important factor in keeping the astronauts sane. Check out this infographic via labley to find out more.

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