You cannot say we did not know.
Our grandmothers knew it. “The love of money is the root of all evil.” “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” “The ease that camels have going through the eye of a needle, relative to the chances of a rich man entering the kingdom of Heaven.”
From the modest “money is power” to that golden rule of money-lending – “he who has the gold makes the rules” – we knew.
The scale and speed of what’s happening now is another matter.
So, after a slightly gloomy summer holiday season with nature doing its best to wake us up to the damage that rich and greedy empires have already inflicted on the world’s infinitely varied populations and nature itself, we’re watching the world’s richest men take reserved seats at the inauguration of the world’s latest despot as he assembles his wrecking crew.
At the same time, political and business leaders are meeting in Davos, Switzerland for the exclusive and high-profile World Economic Forum with its invite-only guest list of high-net worth individuals and influential businesspeople mixing with heads of state, government ministers, economists and academics in the alpine resort village.
In its latest inequality report, the charity Oxfam highlights just how unachievable – or even conceivable – that sort of wealth is for the average person. The average daily income for the world’s billionaires last year was $US2 million a day; for the 10 richest among them, all men, that figure soared to more than $150 million a day.
“Even if someone had saved $1600 every day since the first humans 315,000 years ago, they would still not have accumulated enough money to crack the top 10.”
“Globally, total billionaire wealth grew by $3 trillion last year, up to roughly $8.4 billion a day, three times faster than the year before,” said the report.
With an average of a new billionaire every four weeks, you would think that at least a dozen of these humans would put their heads and their wind-fall, unearned fortunes into lifting colonial debts loaded onto developing nations and ending poverty as an economic tool.
The five richest people last year, according to Forbes, were: 1. Elon Musk, 2. Jeff Bezos, 3. Bernard Arnault and family, 4. Larry Ellison and 5. Mark Zuckerberg.
“The crown jewel of this oligarchy is a billionaire president, backed and bought by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, running the world’s largest economy,” said Oxfam Australia chief executive Lyn Morgain.
Specious inauguration rants by the returned US Commander in Chief make no mention of the fact that America has been a major beneficiary of this extraordinary torrent of money, especially tech and banking, which doesn’t touch the sides of the tax regimes of the countries of origin. They are, apparently, too big to tax.
No wonder that Netflix currently gives us an increasing diet of reprised footage of the Second World War and the Hitler years leading up to it. The similarities are striking, down to the small cabal of men surrounding an inexplicably charismatic figure bent on revenge for perceived slights and world domination.
Or that there are tectonic shifts in the narratives around vanished civilisations, usually societies growing increasingly wealthy and decadent at the expense of an underclass. In Rapa Nui (Easter Island) that meant eventually cutting down all the trees, depleting natural resources on land and sea and exhausting their soils until their population and civilisation collapsed, with just a few thousand people remaining when Europeans arrived on the island in 1722.
That long-held theory is now challenged by a study in the Science Advances Journal which says that Rapa Nui’s population never spiralled to unsustainable levels. Instead, the settlers found ways to cope with the island’s severe limits and maintained a small, stable population for centuries.
Evidence included a sophisticated inventory of ingenious “rock gardens” where the islanders raised highly nutritious sweet potatoes, a staple of their diet. The gardens covered only enough area to support a few thousand people, say the researchers.
“We see clear evidence that while ancient islanders faced difficulties, they also found ingenious solutions, adapting to life on the island in a sustainable way,” said co-author, Professor Terry Hunt.
Sailing across the Pacific from Panama in the 1970s, we stopped in the Marquesas Islands north-west of Rapa Nui. Population in its heyday 2000, then down to hundreds and quietly industrious as they prepared for the fiercely competitive Polynesian14 July cultural festival in Papeete, a few days’ voyage through coral reefs to the south west.
The haunting whir of Polynesian drumming sounded day and night and every evening the bigger drums, fire poi and ukeleles brought us ashore under the waving palms as the village team, bodies gleaming in the firelight, honed their traditional skills. It was infinitely memorable, and one night, as a treat for the yacht crews, the dancers arrived in everyday wear and we danced to 70s pop music, to everyone’s amusement.
Even economics always acknowledged that nature alone provided everything we ever had or made, or ate, however ingeniously we manipulate it for our needs. We are stepping way over the bounds now.
• Liz Waters
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025