THE combined wealth of five white males — Elon Musk of Tesla, Jess Bezos of Amazon, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bernard Arnault of LVMH and Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway — was $453 billion in 2019, poverty and inequality tracker Oxfam said. The coronavirus pandemic years failed to stop them from growing their wealth, which almost doubled to $869 billion in the closing days of 2023.
"If each of the five wealthy men spends a million dollars daily, they would take 476 years to exhaust their combined wealth," Oxfam said. There is no way for one with the mind of a pauper to imagine the kind of money these five white males possess.
And what worldly possessions could be had with $869 billion? In the simple minds of commoners like ourselves, what is playing out is this: how many jumbo container ships would be enough to load $869 billion worth of imported, single-serve instant noodles, the go-to food of millions of Filipinos on the margins? Probably enough to line up from the mouth of the Suez Canal in Egypt to the Port of Manila.
The truth is that most of us in the low-income, low-expenditure bracket can't scale what could be had with $869 billion, even if we die trying. The richest Filipino, wealth tracker Forbes said, is worth just over $7 billion, and we are already dizzied by that amount, which is penny ante in comparison to the extreme collective wealth of Musk, Bezos and company. The $869 billion is equivalent to two years of the Philippines' total economic output. This is probably the biggest illustrator of how big that figure is: just over a dozen countries have their annual gross domestic product reach $1 trillion, while the rest have $900 billion and below.
From extreme wealth, we shift to extreme poverty. We are all familiar with the country beset with abject and intractable poverty.
The 13 million families in this column's headline represented the number of Filipino families who rated themselves as "poor" in the Social Weather Stations (SWS) fourth-quarter 2023 survey. That translates to 47 percent of Filipino families. Another 9 million families ranked themselves as belonging to the "borderline" category — which could be borderline "not poor" or borderline poor — who were too embarrassed to admit how poor they were. Only 5 million families out of the 27 million in total in the Philippines rated themselves as "not poor." Only 0.1 percent of those 5 million families are rich.
The official poverty data normally shows a fifth of the country's total population, which is in stark contrast to the data shown in the self-rated poverty survey of the SWS. The level of self-rated poverty may be much higher than that shown by the official poverty data, but there is no denying that, in both, poverty is deeply rooted, intractable and seemingly irreversible. Government officials have always described the state of the Philippine economy using upbeat phrases, like "rising economic tiger" or "fastest growing economy in the region." The intractable poverty is hardly mentioned. And no one seems interested in answering this question: why do 13 million families rate themselves as poor in the context of a booming economy? Who vacuums up the yearly income gains? Who benefits from the growth?
Data from the World Bank provides an answer to the phenomenon of massive poverty amid substantial economic growth. The World Bank says 17 percent of the yearly income gains go to the top 1 percent. Only 14 percent goes to the bottom 50 percent. There is hardly any intergenerational mobility. Those born poor are destined to remain so. The up-from-the-bootstraps in the middle of the previous century, like the ascent of the "poor boy from Lubao" to the country's presidency, are no longer possible in a century of extreme inequality. The absence of equalizers like good education — a major key in improving one's economic and social status — is also driving the stasis in intergenerational mobility.
The 5 billion people in the headline represented 60 percent of the total population — the global poor, whose wealth dropped by 0.2 percent in the same period the five while males almost doubled theirs, Oxfam said. It goes without saying that many in the bottom 50 of this unequal economic arrangement are slave-wage members of the Philippine working class.
Workers, said Oxfam, work long and hard, "often for poverty wages in precarious and unsafe jobs." Across 52 countries, real wages of 800 million workers dropped in real terms, it added. Over the last two years, the combined loss for these workers was $1.5 trillion, the charity group said.
After Oxfam released the data on the wealth of Musk, Bezos and company came another mind-boggling illustrator on how grotesque the total market cap of the "Magnificent Seven" is. The value of the stocks held by just seven technology giants — Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Nvidia — is currently $12 trillion.
This is the best point of comparison: the $12-trillion value of the stocks of these seven firms is bigger than the value of the stock exchanges of the United Kingdom, China, Japan and France combined. About 10 years ago, the market cap of these tech giants was a mere $1.5 trillion. Since then, more than $10 trillion has been added to their value. One giant leap for just seven tech companies in the context of so much global misery and want.
What has been the reaction of the political leadership amid so much intractable and seemingly irreversible poverty? Squabbling and infantile name-calling. Plotting to stay in power. And amplifying what the international community has suspected all along: that we are just a banana republic with democratic pretensions.
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