The Unimaginable Divide

The Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University, in what it calls the most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken. has just reported the following:

* The richest 2 percent of adults in the world own more than half the world's wealth,

* The richest 1 percent of adults owned 40 percent of global assets in the year 2000, and the richest 10 percent of adults
accounted for 85 percent of the world's total.

* The assets of half of the world's adult population account for barely 1 percent of global wealth.

In the meantime, 400,000 children around the world go hungry every day. And a billion U.S. dollars go down the drain every four days in Iraq.

That is a mortally cockeyed world.