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The relentless rise of the bourgeoisie
We live in an advanced capitalist system, where global extremes of wealth and inequality are becoming entrenched, right?
Wrong, says Goldman Sachs. Witness the investment bank’s projection of individual wealth through until 2050:
The middle class would appear to be on the up - easily doubling in size over the coming couple of decades.
Goldman economists Dominic Wilson and Raluca Dragusanu reckon that by 2030, some 2bn people may join the “world middle class,” bringing huge change in terms of spending patterns, use of resources and political pressure.
In a recent paper - The Expanding Middle: The Exploding Middle Class and Falling Global Inequality - the pair note that while the rise of middle-income economies such as the BRICs has drawn lots of commentary, this actually represents a shift in spending power towards middle income people.
What we are witnessing dwarfs even the 19th-century middle class explosion in its global scale.
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Goldie hits another one… To me this indicative of the corrosion of their predominant position as the financial power. Text detailing their fall from grace.
Poor GS that paid these folks to reach these conclusions.
Tell them to visit Brazil’s countryside, meet the 90% of a population that can’t barely read a basic text (when they read, they dont understand) and really place a bet that those people will have an income of USD 50K in 2007 terms someday
I m not a GS economist (if that is a good thing, dunno), but how can so many no-skills-whatsoever people be paid that much? In the BRICs countries, they are counted by hundreds of millions.
They have chosen 2030 cos by then they ll be probably be retired and no one will even remember this bunch of almost-random assumptions put together leading to a non-sense conclusion.
And, better, what is the practical conclusion of this work? Buy or sell P&G for example? Seems that the axe at GS has missed these guys…
this is analysis is so bad its hilarious. Typical of the kind of ridiculous projections based on absurd assumptions and arrogance that economists suffer from.
Following both points below Paul, the list of assumptions for their projection model is needed . Pity it is quite so far out. 42 years is beyond any useful planning horizons; with a few exceptions such as global warming.
Hamish has gone into this in some detail in Weds & Thurs’ Independent.
More from the basis of balance of national power than individual wealth.
But given the current pressures on the environment, raw materials etc, what are the 400 000 000 Americans and 75 000 000 British in 2050 going to spend their $90 000 p.a. each on?
What I wonder is whether the redistribution of wealth is a function of increasing prosperity for the middle peoples of the developing world or a decrease in the value of the dollar and pound on a relative basis of exchange as the US and UK lose their dominance in the global economy.