The Little Brown Reader

Hooper and Henderson: The Top One Percent Includes You

Charley Hooper is a friend of mine who helps with our local Libertarian Party activities quite a lot. David Henderson is a friend and former teacher of Charley's who came here for a talk a while back.

In other words, I know these guys. :-)

TCS: Tech Central Station - The Top One Percent Includes You

Presidential aspirant John Kerry likes to discuss "the wealthiest one percent". In this he is following in the footsteps of Al Gore who, when running for president, excoriated the one percenters to drive a wedge between them and the rest of us, hoping that enough of the rest of us would vote for him. Fellow demagogue Paul Krugman also often attacks the top 1 percent.

Here's why. Carl Haub, senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., has estimated that 106 billion humans have been born since Homo sapiens appeared about 50,000 years ago. That means that the richest one percent in history includes 1.06 billion people. There are currently 6.2 billion humans alive, leaving approximately 100 billion who have died. Who among the dead was rich by today's standards? Not many. Royalty, popes, presidents, dictators, large landholders, and the occasional wealthy industrialist, such as Andrew Carnegie and Leland Stanford, were certainly rich. All told, it is difficult to imagine more than 20 million of these people since ancient Egyptian times. This leaves 1.04 billion wealthy alive today, or 17% of the world's population....