“An analysis by The Economist finds that, for the first time in its 25-year dataset, over half of global billionaire wealth is now held by self-made billionaires who made their fortunes through ‘competitive activities,’ meaning by providing goods and services in competitive markets, as opposed to inheriting their wealth or accumulating it in politically connected industries,” reports The Doomslayer.
The Economist explains:
More and more billionaires derive their wealth not from accidents of birth or from gaming the system, but by providing useful goods and services and by employing thousands of people…
The Economist has quantified the better (Ms Winfrey, Mr Yanai) and worse (Mr Burns) sorts of billionaire wealth. Drawing on data from Forbes, a magazine, Hurun, a research firm, and Gapminder, a Swedish foundation, we have assembled a list of about 7,000 billionaires from the past 25 years. We call a billionaire’s wealth ‘uncompetitive’ when it mainly comes from industries such as gambling, construction, defence and raw materials. These sectors often depend on political access. It is hard to open a mine or a casino, for instance, without friends in the government.
We count inheritors in the ‘uncompetitive’ category. Heirs are usually not oligarchs. They have usually not bent or broken any laws, or screwed over customers; they were simply born into the right family or married well. Yet they plausibly represent policy failures too, on the grounds that their immense riches are undeserved.
From 2001, when our data begin, to 2014, the uncompetitive share of billionaire wealth rose slightly. Yet over the past decade the share derived from self-made entrepreneurs in competitive sectors has surged to an all-time high (see chart 2). For the first time, half the wealth of the world’s billionaires is reasonably fairly earned. And since 2021 the total wealth derived from uncompetitive sectors has declined.
Annual child deaths have fallen by 8 million since 1990.
“The number of children living in extreme poverty fell to a record low of 412 million in 2024, down from 507 million a decade earlier,” reported The Doomslayer. The percentage of children living in poverty has never been lower in human history.
Global life expectancy and income are at an all-time high.
Child labor has fallen sharply.
Poverty has fallen in most of the world since 2021, in each year since then.
Poverty has declined rapidly in the world’s most mountainous country, Bhutan.
