Wealth Inequality Is a Choice: How the Global System Protects Power Over People

By Douglas Reid Ashcroft

The World Already Has Everything It Needs. The People Running It Have Simply Decided You Don’t Deserve It.

Let me ask you something, and I want you to think about it carefully before you instinctively reach for your comfortable ideological security blanket.

Right now, as you read this, approximately 1.6 billion people on this planet are living in inadequate housing — or no housing at all. Roughly 733 million people will go to bed hungry tonight. Somewhere north of four billion people lack meaningful access to basic healthcare, with a further 2 billion experiencing financial hardship from healthcare costs. And between 244 and 300 million children — children — are out of school, not because there’s no room for them, but because the machinery to get them there has simply never been built.

Here’s the part that should make you genuinely furious:

None of this has to be happening. Not even close to this degree. And if you believe the reason it IS happening is scarcity — that we simply don’t have the resources, the technology, or the organizational sophistication to do better — then you have been lied to so smoothly, for so long, by people who profit so enormously from your believing it, that I almost can’t hold it against you.

Almost.

The Numbers Don’t Lie. The People Citing Them Often Do.

Start with food, because it’s the most viscerally obvious. The global food system currently produces enough calories to feed approximately 10 billion people. We are a planet of roughly 8 billion. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has been publishing this data for decades, and it doesn’t get any less damning with repetition. (I can hear someone already reaching for “but logistics” and “distribution costs” — yes, sit down, we’ll get there.) The problem is not production. We produce 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year that gets thrown away — one-third of all food produced globally, by the FAO’s own published figures. In North America and Europe alone, consumers waste between 95 and 115 kilograms of food per person annually. Meanwhile, according to the World Food Programme, every one of those 733 million hungry people could be fed for an estimated $40 to $50 billion per year.

Forty to fifty billion dollars. That is about one tenth of the net worth increase that just the world’s ten richest individuals collectively experienced in 2023, according to Forbes tracking data.

Let me say that again so it can actually land. About six weeks worth of wealth accumulation for just ten people would be enough to end global hunger for a year. That’s not touching their principle wealth — that’s just taking the new wealth they accumulated over an average six-week period. Hell, In 2023, Elon Musk alone amassed over $108 billion in new wealth — enough to fund the World Food Programme’s estimated annual cost to end global hunger not once, but twice, with billions still left over.

And we are seriously going to keep talking about scarcity?

An Illustration: Because Some Arguments Require a Good Story Before They Can Be Heard

Imagine a small town. A hundred people. Every morning, the town bakes exactly one hundred loaves of bread — enough, if distributed reasonably, to give everyone a decent meal. But in this town, five people — the mayor, two of his cousins, the man who owns the mill, and the woman who runs the granary — have, over time, arranged the town’s economy such that 60 of those loaves flow automatically into their possession before the morning distribution is half finished. Not because they need 60 loaves. A person can only eat so much bread before they simply have a very large, rapidly staling pile of it. But because they wrote the rules about who owns the mill, who controls the granary, who sets the price at market, and — crucially — what counts as a “fair” distribution in the first place.

The remaining 40 loaves must now feed 95 people. Some of them manage. Many don’t. And when the hungry ones stand up at the town meeting and say, “I wonder if there might be a distribution problem here,” the mill-owner’s newspaper publishes a series of thoughtful editorials explaining that the real issue is laziness, or the unfortunate complexity of bread economics, or the regrettable but unavoidable constraints of agricultural supply chains — and that anyone suggesting the five prosperous men at the top have anything to do with it is a dangerous radical who obviously wants to destroy everything the town has worked so hard to build.

This is the global economy. I have simplified it somewhat. I have not simplified it as much as you might hope.

Housing, Healthcare, Education: Same Story. Three Different Rooms.

Look at housing. The UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing estimates approximately 1.6 billion people lack adequate shelter. The resources to close that gap are, by any serious analysis, demonstrably available. A 2021 assessment from economists at the McKinsey Global Institute put the cost of addressing the global housing deficit at roughly $650 billion in targeted annual investment. Sounds enormous, does it? Bear in mind that Knight Frank’s Wealth Report shows that more than 700,000 people now possess fortunes exceeding $30 million — a concentration of private wealth measured in the tens of trillions. It is an economic stratum so swollen with capital that it eclipses the fiscal capacity of entire governments. In a world where billions struggle for housing, food, and basic security, this level of accumulation is not merely an imbalance; it is a moral indictment of a global system that protects extreme wealth more fiercely than it protects human life. You could build your way entirely out of the global housing crisis using a fraction of the interest income on existing private fortunes, without touching the principal. The arithmetic is not subtle.

The reason we’re not doing it is not that we lack the money. The reason we’re not doing it is that residential property has been systematically converted from places-people-live-in into investment vehicles for capital to accumulate. In Canada — my country, the one I actually live in and watch — Statistics Canada data shows corporate and investor ownership of residential properties has been climbing at double-digit rates annually in major urban markets. Toronto. Vancouver. Ottawa. The houses exist. The land exists. The construction industry exists. What has changed is who the houses are for.

(And no, this is not a rant about capitalism in the abstract — I can hear the libertarians relaxing in their chairs — it’s a rant about a specific, identifiable, documented mechanism by which financial returns get systematically prioritized over human shelter needs. Those are different arguments.)

Healthcare tells the same story with an American accent. The United States spends approximately $4.5 trillion per year on its healthcare system — roughly 18% of its entire GDP. It still leaves somewhere between 25 and 30 million people uninsured. Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, and virtually every other wealthy democratic nation provide universal coverage for less money, per capita, with measurably better outcomes across almost every major health indicator you care to name. This isn’t a mystery. It isn’t an unsolved technical problem requiring further study. We know how to do universal healthcare. It has been done. Repeatedly. It works.

The reason 28 million Americans don’t have it is not a failure of organizational capacity. It is because the health insurance industry spent more than $250 million lobbying Congress during the years surrounding the Affordable Care Act debate alone — a tidal wave of corporate influence deployed to shape, dilute, and ultimately protect the industry’s profits. The money to provide healthcare is there. It is simply flowing toward shareholders and executive compensation suites rather than toward actual medical care. That’s not a supply problem. That’s a decision.

The “we simply cannot afford universal healthcare” argument is the precise kind of bullshit that, if you uttered it to a health economist who had spent a decade in a sealed bunker, would produce a look of genuine, bewildered confusion.

Here Is Who Is Actually Responsible. I’m Going to Be Specific.

Here is where I expect to be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. So let me pre-empt that by pointing out: this is not a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy requires secrecy. What I am describing is conducted almost entirely in public — in legislative chambers, lobbying disclosure filings, board meeting minutes, and academic papers that anyone with a library card can read.

(1) The wealthiest individuals and corporations on the planet exert measurable, documented, entirely legal influence over political systems through lobbying, campaign financing, revolving-door employment of former regulators, and the institutional funding of think-tanks whose conclusions happen to align almost perfectly with the financial interests of their donors. This is not a theory — it is the literal, stated operational function of organizations like the Business Roundtable in the United States, the World Economic Forum globally, and the Fraser Institute in Canada, to name a very modest sample.

(2) These political systems then consistently produce outcomes — on tax policy, housing regulation, healthcare financing, trade agreements, labor law, education funding, pharmaceutical pricing, environmental protection — that serve and expand the interests of those wealthy actors, while the language used to justify those outcomes almost always invokes the public good.

(3) The intellectual infrastructure that legitimizes this arrangement — the think-tanks, the op-ed writers, the economists who model “optimal market behavior” in papers underwritten by the financial industry — is predominantly funded by the same actors who benefit from the conclusions those institutions produce. This is not a secret. The funding disclosures are public. The overlap between funders and conclusions is, shall we say, striking in its consistency.

There are, as far as I can see, only two possibilities here. Either the people managing the global economy are (a) genuinely unable to calculate that we could house, feed, educate, and provide healthcare for every human being on this planet using existing resources and existing technology — in which case they are very, very, very dumb people who cannot do arithmetic — or (b) they can see this perfectly clearly and have concluded it is not in their interest to make it happen. Take your pick. Neither option is flattering. But option (b) is considerably more frightening, and considerably better supported by the evidence.

I’ve spent time around a number of very impressive people who have made their peace with this arrangement. Some of them hold endowed chairs at major universities. Some of them run financial institutions. Some of them have TED Talks with fifteen million views and books on the bestseller lists and very articulate things to say at Davos each January. They are, many of them, genuinely formidable intellects — deeply informed, technically sophisticated, capable of producing rigorous-sounding analyses of extraordinary complexity.

And every single one of them, when you push past the modeling language and the systems vocabulary and the careful invocations of “market complexity” and “structural constraints,” is operating from a foundational assumption so embedded they can no longer perceive it as an assumption: that the current distribution of power and wealth is, if not optimal, at least structurally inevitable.

It isn’t. It is a choice. It was always a choice. It is being chosen, right now, by people who are choosing it deliberately.

Very, very smart idiots. The world is absolutely full of them.

What We Are Actually Talking About, If We’re Being Honest

We already possess the manufacturing capacity, through computer-aided design, advanced production systems, and modern supply chain organization, to build durable, repairable, long-lasting goods at scale — and to deliberately not build products engineered to fail in eighteen months so that consumers must replace them. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has done the research on circular economy models. The technology is not theoretical. Organizational frameworks for it have been piloted across multiple industries and geographies with documented success. The reason we don’t build things to last is not incapacity. It’s because planned obsolescence is an extraordinarily profitable business model, and the companies that profit from it have successfully ensured that no meaningful regulatory framework in any major market has seriously threatened it.

This is what I want lodged in your head the next time a polished person — a politician, an economist, a columnist, a very credentialed expert at a very expensive conference — tells you that ending poverty, housing people, feeding people, providing healthcare, educating children, and building goods designed to outlast their warranty periods are beautiful, noble goals, but tragically, tragically beyond our collective reach.

They are not describing a physical reality.

They are describing a choice — and dressing it up in the costume of inevitability, so that you will stop demanding that it be made differently.

People need to get MUCH more angry about this. Not in the diffuse, algorithmic way we perform anger on social media, scrolling past outrage like it’s a content type. Specifically angry. Precisely angry. Angry in ways that can name the mechanism, identify the beneficiary, follow the public record, and ask — loudly, persistently, with a refusal to accept the usual deflections about complexity and trade-offs and the regrettable limitations of the possible — why exactly we are choosing this, and who is doing the choosing.

Because it is a choice.

It’s just not one that most of us have had any real voice in making.

Think about that.

Sources: UN Food and Agriculture Organization (food waste and global production data); World Food Programme (cost to end hunger); Forbes Billionaires real-time tracking (wealth accumulation data); World Bank (global housing deficit); Knight Frank Wealth Report (ultra-high-net-worth asset data); Peterson Institute for International Economics (housing investment analysis); Statistics Canada (investor ownership of residential properties); Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (US healthcare expenditure); OECD Health Statistics (comparative international healthcare outcomes); Center for Responsive Politics / OpenSecrets (healthcare lobbying figures); Ellen MacArthur Foundation (circular economy research).

Further Reading:

• OECD — Health at a Glance 2025 – The definitive annual comparison of healthcare spending and outcomes across wealthy nations. Shows exactly what universal coverage costs — and delivers — everywhere except the US.
• OpenSecrets — Health Sector Lobbying – Tracks every dollar the health industry spends influencing Congress. Updated annually. The gap between lobbying totals and coverage outcomes tells its own story.
• NIH/PubMed — The Global Cost of Reaching a World Without Hunger – Peer-reviewed cost modelling of ending global hunger. Conclusion: $39–50 billion annually. Not prohibitive. Simply deprioritised.
• World Food Programme — We Have the Resources to End Hunger – WFP’s Executive Director states publicly that $40 billion ends global hunger — while US billionaire wealth grew by $1 trillion in one year.
• UN News — Ending World Hunger Costs Less Than 1% of Military Spending – Published January 2026. $93 billion annually ends hunger. The world spent $21.9 trillion on military in the past decade. The math is not complicated.

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