In my previous blog post I looked at a report from StatsCan that suggested that income distribution in Canada had become less unequal between 2006 and 2012. Today we have a report from UBS and something called Wealth-X that seems to confirm the contrary point I was trying to make: if you look at wealth rather than income, you get a quite different picture.
Let's skip over the jaw-dropping fact that 0.004% of the world's adult population accounts for 13% of global wealth and look at the Canadian numbers. And what do we find? Remarkably, it appears that both the number of "ultra-rich" in Canada, and the size of their stash, are increasing faster than the comparable numbers in the United States. ("Ultra-rich" is defined as holding more than $30 million in net assets).
If I can go a bit Piketty on you for a second, one intriguing finding of the survey is that 75 percent of Canada's ultra-rich are considered to be self-made, with only 13 percent inheriting it. You have to wonder how they calculated that: by asking people to self-define, maybe? Few people are likely to report themselves as being one of the "idle rich" if they have any choice in the matter. Those numbers are certainly out of line with many of Piketty's findings, which place considerable emphasis on inheritance.
In any case, since the average ultra-rich Canadian is 63 years old, it seems inevitable that inherited wealth will form a growing proportion of the total in the years ahead. That will further entrench the rising level of inequality to which Piketty and others have drawn attention, ensuring that his comparisons with the gilded age of Fitzwilliam Darcy and Pere Goriot lose none of their relevance.
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