The world’s richest people became significantly richer in 2017. The Bloomberg media outlet keeps a list of the 500 richest people in the world and found that they added $1 trillion to their collective wealth in 2017. The increase was 23% greater than the increase in 2016 so the pace of accumulation seems to be picking up. According to Bloomberg: “By the end of trading Tuesday, Dec. 26, the 500 billionaires controlled $5.3 trillion”. The Guardian puts the good fortunes of the wealthy in context:
“These millionaires – who account for 0.7% of the world’s adult population – control 46% of total global wealth that now stands at $280tn. At the other end of the spectrum, the world’s 3.5 billion poorest adults each have assets of less than $10,000 (£7,600). Collectively these people, who account for 70% of the world’s working age population, account for just 2.7% of global wealth.”
It is hard to imagine that such inequality is sustainable over the long run. As The Guardian puts it: “The world’s super-rich hold the greatest concentration of wealth since the US Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century”.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its annual “Arctic Report” and the report suggests that the Arctic is changing at a more rapid rate than ever in the last 1,500 years. Jeremy Mathis is an arctic scientist at NOAA and assesses the changes in this way: “There is no normal….That’s what so strange about what’s happening in the Arctic. … The environment is changing so quickly in such a short amount of time that we can’t quite get a handle on what this new state is going to look like.” The change in sea ice has been dramatic in recent years and many believe that permanent sea ice may not exist in a few years.
World Politics News 
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