"It is interesting to note that the 200 richest people have more assets than the 2 billion poorest"
About this Quote
The number isn’t offered as a trivia fact; it’s a moral ambush. By pairing “200” with “2 billion,” David Korten compresses a sprawling, abstract system into a single, legible scandal. The phrasing “It is interesting to note” is doing strategic work: it pretends to be mild, almost academic, while smuggling in outrage. The cool tone is a lure. Once you accept the comparison as “interesting,” you’re already halfway to conceding it’s indefensible.
Korten’s intent is activist math: turn inequality into a ratio so stark it bypasses partisan arguments about effort, merit, or efficiency. He doesn’t say “unfair” or “immoral,” because the architecture of the sentence makes those words feel redundant. The subtext is that the economy isn’t merely producing winners and losers; it’s engineered to concentrate power so heavily that “assets” become a proxy for political voice, life chances, and whose suffering gets treated as normal.
Context matters because this line sits inside the late-20th/early-21st century critique of corporate globalization, deregulation, and finance-driven growth. Korten’s target isn’t just billionaire wealth; it’s the legitimacy of institutions that treat such concentration as a sign of success. “Assets” is also a careful choice: not income, not consumption, but ownership - the kind of wealth that compounds quietly and confers control. The quote works because it forces the reader into a single uncomfortable question: if the headline numbers are this grotesque, what exactly is the system optimizing for?
Korten’s intent is activist math: turn inequality into a ratio so stark it bypasses partisan arguments about effort, merit, or efficiency. He doesn’t say “unfair” or “immoral,” because the architecture of the sentence makes those words feel redundant. The subtext is that the economy isn’t merely producing winners and losers; it’s engineered to concentrate power so heavily that “assets” become a proxy for political voice, life chances, and whose suffering gets treated as normal.
Context matters because this line sits inside the late-20th/early-21st century critique of corporate globalization, deregulation, and finance-driven growth. Korten’s target isn’t just billionaire wealth; it’s the legitimacy of institutions that treat such concentration as a sign of success. “Assets” is also a careful choice: not income, not consumption, but ownership - the kind of wealth that compounds quietly and confers control. The quote works because it forces the reader into a single uncomfortable question: if the headline numbers are this grotesque, what exactly is the system optimizing for?
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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