Rising inequality will mean less wealth for everyone

Wealth inequality is falling in most of the world but rising in the West. That doesn’t bode well for us, says Merryn Somerset Webb. History shows that a rise in inequality leads to a decline in the ability to create wealth.

Regular readers will know the extent to which I suffer for knowledge. And so it was that I found myself at the National Association of Pension Funds conference in the rain in Edinburgh this week. The good news is that many fund management companies there were handing out free umbrellas (thanks, everyone). My search for nuggets of interest was also a great success.

On Wednesday morning, Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, gave a talk in which he showed some fabulous feel-good charts (falling infant mortality, rising contentment, rising food availability, fewer war-related deaths, more democracy, etc). The most interesting were on rising global wealth. He suggested that it won't be long now before extreme poverty is eradicated (on current projections, almost no one will be living on less than a dollar a day by 2028).

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.