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.
