Richest 1 percent captured 41 percent of new wealth
A Ledger That Now Reads Like a Photograph
For decades, the gap between rich and poor was something economists estimated. They inferred it from tax returns, from household surveys, from national accounts that were never designed to track who owns what. The picture was assembled after the fact, like a portrait painted from memory. What changed is that the accounting has become direct. The numbers no longer describe a trend; they describe a transfer.
Between 2000 and 2024, the richest 1% of people captured 41% of all new wealth. [2] That figure comes from a commentary article published in Nature (J. E. Stiglitz et al. Nature 657, 345-348; 2025). [2] The same accounting shows that the poorest 50% — half of humanity — captured just 1%. [2] Those two numbers sit side by side: 41 and 1. One group of people, roughly 80 million adults, absorbed two-fifths of every new dollar, euro, and yuan created in a quarter century. The other group, some four billion people, split a single percent.
The method behind those figures matters as much as the figures. Income inequality and wealth inequality were measured together, in one framework, over the same 24-year window. That is not how the data usually arrive. Income is what you earn in a year; wealth is what you own after debts are subtracted. They move at different speeds and are tracked by different agencies. Here they were placed on the same ledger. The result is a portrait, not a sketch.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, the economist whose name leads the commentary, has spent his career on exactly this problem: how the rules of an economy determine who keeps the gains. [1] The commentary he co-authored does not merely present the 41% and 1% figures. It asks what institution could make such numbers visible on a regular basis, the way a thermometer makes a fever visible.
From a Single
Study to a Standing Institution
The commentary’s central proposal is an International Panel on Inequality. The name is deliberate. It echoes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body that turned scattered climate research into a single authoritative assessment that governments could not ignore. [3] The logic is the same: if inequality is measured once, in one paper, it can be dismissed as one team’s finding. If it is measured repeatedly, by a standing panel, it becomes a fact that policy must answer to.
That is the unexpected application. A set of statistics about the past 24 years is being used to argue for a permanent institution. The 41% and 1% are not the end of the argument; they are the evidence that the argument needs a home. Without such a body, each new study starts from zero. With one, the measurement accumulates.
The commentary appeared in Nature, the same journal that publishes findings on genomes and black holes. That placement is itself a statement: inequality is being treated as a planetary-scale phenomenon, not a domestic political topic. The authors are not asking for a new tax or a new treaty in this piece. They are asking for a new instrument of measurement — and for that instrument to be international, so that no single government controls what it finds.
What the panel would measure is already defined by the gap it would track. Income and wealth, together, across countries, over time. The 41% and 1% are the first reading from that kind of ledger. The proposal is to keep reading.
The Contradiction Left Standing
Here is what the numbers do not resolve. The richest 1% captured 41% of new wealth between 2000 and 2024. That is a measurement of outcome. It does not say which rules produced it, and the commentary does not claim to. The poorest 50% captured 1%. That is also an outcome. Between those two outcomes lies a quarter century of policy choices — on taxation, on inheritance, on the returns to capital versus the returns to labor — that the ledger records but does not explain.
The contradiction is this: the same period that produced these figures also produced the fastest reduction in extreme poverty in recorded history. More people escaped bare subsistence between 2000 and 2024 than in any comparable stretch. Yet half of humanity still split 1% of the new wealth. Both things are true. The panel the commentary proposes would have to hold them at once, without letting either cancel the other.
That is the unresolved question. A measurement that shows 41% going to the top and 1% going to the bottom is precise about the distribution. It is silent on whether the total is growing fast enough to matter, or whether the concentration is the price of the growth. The commentary names the problem and builds the instrument. The instrument, once built, will have to answer what the first reading cannot.
Sources
2. Nature