Around the time that Low and Najib went boating with the PetroSaudi founders, the Malaysian central government took control of the wealth fund – which was soon renamed as 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) and given a mandate to promote economic development in Malaysia.
Maybe monopolies that own the robots will take control of the wealth, or maybe governments will but the majority of us will probably be starved and in agony, with no work left to do.
Controlling the many tiny islands is in part a matter of controlling of the wealth assumed to lay beneath the sea in the form of unexploited minerals and oil and gas, not to mention the immense fisheries that exist in these waters.
America, enthuses a leaked Citibank report, is now a modern-day "plutonomy" where the top 1% of the population control 95% of the wealth.
It is based on a small segment of haves who control most of the wealth and opportunity, and their refusal to share advancement opportunities.
That's because the distinctly dystopian features of our present – a small number of people control most of the wealth, and global warming is heating portions of the planet past habitable levels – won't simply disappear with automation.
The most sobering fact is that the World Bank's figure of Brazil's richest 10percentt controlling more than 50percentt of the country's wealth pales in comparison with the United States, the world champion of wealth inequality, where the richest 1percentt control 34percentt of the wealth.
For every hippy talking about world peace or traveller wanting to heal the world, another will mention the exact tax rates that rich Americans pay, or that 20% of the US population now control 84% of the wealth.
Whites, who still control most of the wealth, live largely locked away behind high security fences, on which the words 'armed response' are emblazoned, and are still looked after by a small battalion of non-whites in subordinate domestic roles.
At the moment -- as one Davis panel discussed Wednesday -- 1percentt of the world's families control 40percentt of the wealth, and one third of the world's workers, or about 1.1 billion people, are either unemployed or impoverished.
The richest 1percentt of Americans now collect 24percentt of the income and control 40percentt of the wealth -- a gap that has become markedly more pronounced in recent years, in a phenomenon the author and economist Paul Krugman calls the "Great Divergence".
