Rothkopf: Global power elite one in a million
Who's at the top of the global heap? Generally speaking, about 6,000 rich, well-connected, lucky baby boomers, many of European extraction.
Special to the Star-Telegram
If you counted every person on the planet with really global power -- the fattest of the fat cats, the biggest of the big cheeses -- you would end up with about 6,000 people.
At least that's what I came up with while preparing a book on the subject. I tried to identify all those who could influence millions of lives in multiple countries on a regular basis -- a metric that gives you about 6,000 power players of various kinds. There are heads of state and other government leaders, for example, CEOs of the biggest companies, and heads of the biggest banks and investment firms.
Most of the world's 1,100 or so billionaires make the cut -- two jumbo-jet-loads full of men and women who have a net worth almost twice that of the poorest 2.5 billion people on the planet.
The group also includes big-time religious leaders, media moguls, a few terrorists, a few criminals and a bunch of miscellaneous actors, singers, scientists, writers and other cultural icons who not only have an audience but can move it to action.
That's 6,000 people on a planet of 6 billion. Each one, in other words, is literally one in a million.
Unsettling thoughts
Naturally, the existence of such a group raises many questions. Do they use their incredibly concentrated power to help game the system? Did the world's financial titans help create a global system that produced the recent subprime mortgage mess and subsequent market meltdown? And did they then use their influence to get the government (which they resisted when it tried to regulate them) dive in to save them?
That's a rhetorical question.
Of course they did.
A bigger, related question is whether that kind of disproportionate power has led to a global system in which the rich are getting much, much richer and the poor are falling farther and farther behind. And there are mountains of evidence suggesting that this is just what has happened.
Whether it is about the richest countries now being 100 times richer than the poorest countries -- when a century ago they were only nine times richer -- or about how the bottom 90 percent of Americans have seen their income rise only 2 percent following the gains of the past decade while the top 0.01 percent have seen it rise 112 percent, the story is stark and unsettling.
But perhaps the question that comes up the most often is this: If these guys have it so good, how do I join up?
It's a good question. I grew up hearing about the World Jewish Conspiracy and always figured that since there weren't so many of us, I would have a good shot at controlling something. Nothing flashy -- Canada, say, or the world sorghum market. But the problem is that most of the conspiracy theories out there are wrong on just about every level and thus don't offer a good road map to world domination -- or even to extravagant, excessive, holy-cow, he's-worth-more-than-most-countries kinds of wealth.
Just what it takes
My study of these 6,000 global power players was intended to provide just those sorts of clues. And from that study, eight rules for becoming a member of the superclass emerge:
1 Be born a man. No group is more disproportionately over-represented among all of the world's elites than men. Women make up only about 6 percent of the superclass.
2 Be a baby boomer. For now, it is the boomers' time to rule. Only 3 percent of the superclass is under 40; 45 percent are over 60. The median age is 58.
3 Trace your cultural roots to Europe. No country has even half as many superclass members as the United States, and North America and Europe together make up half of today's global elite. (Although the fastest-growing source of new members is Asia.)
4 Attend an elite university. From a sample of the larger group, we found that almost a third of the small community of the most powerful people in the world went to one of only 20 elite universities. Only 2 percent of the group are high school drop-outs.
5 Go into business or finance. Elites in the past not only had more national power bases, but more were linked to government or the military. Modern war is too costly to fight these days, however, and national governments have less and less power in the global environment, which is why the people who control the truly global institutions of our era -- private-sector giants from finance or the corporate world -- make up 60 percent of the superclass.
6 Have an institutional power base. Money alone isn't power. You need support, and networks and institutions give most superclass members these things. Fewer than 2 percent of the group are not associated with a company, a government, a military organization, a church, a media outlet or a shadow entity of the criminal kind.
7 Get rich. Even if money doesn't always equate to power, it often does. It is estimated that about two-thirds of the superclass are millionaires.
8 Be lucky. Demography is not destiny. There are plenty of 60-ish, Harvard-educated, male American millionaires who are not members of the global elite. Don't feel too sorry for them. There are also plenty of people just as smart and hard-working who had the misfortune to be born in the developing world and who haven't even had the opportunity to make a decent living. Talk to most members of the superclass and almost all will acknowledge that luck (usually accompanied by a lot of hard work) plays a big part in their achievements.
What can be learned
There is no perfect recipe for super-success. There is no one path to the very pinnacle of earthly power. In the past, it helped to be born into it, and that's still not a bad way to start. True, today there are more ways into the group than before, but access is jealously guarded, and almost all of the rules favor the haves over the have-nots.
Which raises another question: What do we do about this group?
The story of history is the story of elites who rose up, over-reached and were brought down. But this global elite has an edge: There are no national governments or laws that can easily rein them in. They float above old jurisdictions in many cases, and it is hard to offset their power since most international institutions are weak or dysfunctional.
So of all the questions posed by the study of the superclass, the most important is: What's to become of them? Because in knowing the answer, we learn much about what is to become of the rest of us.
Hear the author
David Rothkopf will speak to members and guests of the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth.
When: 11:30 a.m. Thursday. The luncheon and program begin at noon, followed by a book signing.
Where: Fort Worth Club, 306 W. Seventh St.
Cost: $45 for WAC members and guests; $60 for nonmembers. Without lunch, tickets are $15 for members and $30 for nonmembers.
To register: Go to www.dfwworld.org or call 214-965-8407.
