The G20 just received a report card from Joseph Stiglitz, who says we are facing an “inequality emergency”.

The G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality, led by Joseph Stiglitz is a comprehensive and damning indictment of the global economic system.

This document confirms the global financial system is intentionally engineered to reward wealth, enrich billionaires, hand power to monopolistic mega-corporations and undermine unions.

What is so pronounced is how the report frames the multiple crises we face as an “inequality emergency” that threatens democracy, and drives this home with the shocking data on ultra-wealth concentration: “41% of new wealth captured by the top 1% since 2000”. It is important to note that the billionaire wealth doesn’t just appear. It was “captured”, extracted, siphoned off from the vast majority.

The extensive analysis by Stiglitz and his co-authors details the the scale, drivers, and consequences of global inequality. Around 70 pages provides the hard facts and stats that traces inequality to the neoliberal demands like deregulation, tax cuts, and weakened labour laws. These demands were the “rescue mission” for capitalist profits at the expensive of workers during the 1970s and 1980s, and have continued up to now.

It makes the point that global inequality is not some unfortunate by-product or broken system, but the intended result of a global legal and financial architecture designed for elite capture. Global rules on trade, finance, investment, and intellectual property actively determine income distribution, and limit national policies that could curb wealth disparity.

For the G20, the report is a long overdue validation of global union criticisms that the “global economic model that has privileged profits over wages and speculation over production”. The report also correctly links the current struggles against austerity and deregulation to the absolute necessity of strengthening of unions, collective bargaining and universal public services.

Unsurprisingly, there has been push-back from organised, global capital, especially its proposals for breaking up corporate monopolies. For example, the tech lobby group ITIF argues that inequality should not be a focus of anti-monopoly policies. The fact that they are so openly defending extreme corporate power shows how blatant, powerful and confident the tech neo-feudalists have become — they even argue that the current tech consolidation is beneficial for consumers, “particularly low-income consumers”!

The joke (although they wouldn’t see it as such) is their criticism of the report is that anti-monopoly efforts are “critically flawed” because they introduce politics into law. However, the entire G20 report demonstrates that the current economic structure is already political, rigged by the wealthy for their benefit.

This is the system of financialised global capitalism where rent extraction triumphs over productive capacity. Wealth is generated not through “entrepreneurial” activity (despite what the OpenAI and a16z tech-bros would say) but through monopoly power, protected intellectual property, and favourable political-economic architecture.

This economic concentration inevitably translates into political inequality, where wealthy billionaire elites dominate media, culture and policy outcomes. The consequence globally, and in Australia, is that trust in institutions is damaged, and there is increased political polarisation.

Inequality is a direct threat to democracy itself.

This threat manifests in many different existential crises. Climate change, pandemics, war, pollution, health, income. All local, national and global challenges that are undermined by extreme inequality and the excessive power of corporations.

There’s so much in this report to point to.

For example, the extreme, exorbitant levels of wealth capture by the global billionaire class. Between 2000 and 2024, “the richest 1% have seen their average wealth rise by US$1.3m, while the bottom 50% have seen their wealth rise by just US$585 over the same period, in constant 2024 dollars.”

It’s hard to visualise how extreme this. Here’s my attempt.

What’s more, this wealth is almost entirely captured by and transferred through inheritance. Most new billionaires are created through inheriting vast hoards of unearned wealth — around $70 trillion in wealth is expected to be transferred to heirs over the next decade, largely untaxed. This is creating a new generation of intergenerational, feudal plutocrats.

Perhaps the most concerning and dangerous consequence of inequality is that there is a direct causal link between economic disparity and “democratic decline”. This simply means that countries suffering from high inequality are seven times more likely to become more authoritarian. We just need to look at how the US has become a system where economic power equals naked political power with almost no democratic checks and balances.

What is the most disappointing (but not surprising) part of the report is its feeble recommendation to create an “International Panel on Inequality” modelled on the ineffective IPCC (“there’s a crisis, let’s have a panel!”). It’s a classic example of the system attempting to diagnose its own illness to prevent death, without being willing to perform the necessary surgery.

Nonetheless, the report shows unequivocally that inequality is a choice, inequality has reached dangerous, catastrophic levels, and that inequality can and must be reversed.

To reverse it, there must be both structural confrontation and political clarity about the challenge.

The current struggle is rooted in a system designed for extraction and oppression — aided and abetted by states captured by the profit-motive. Today’s global disparities date back to the colonial era and the purposeful structuring of economies to extract raw materials and exploit cheap labour.

Our response must therefore reject the neoliberal consensus that the corporate lobbyists and apologists demand.

We must articulate the “we” (working people, the impoverished, the marginalised) versus the “them” (the ultra-rich, mega-corporate monopolists, and rentiers).

We must demand economic democracy. This can be achieved through shifting the balance of power within corporations, through requiring worker representation on boards, encouraging worker-owned and community-owned cooperatives, and enabling strong collective bargaining.

We must also target the mechanisms that global capital maintains its dominance, especially the financial rules that enable tax avoidance and intellectual property monopolies. In Australia, this especially means the rentierism of the oil and gas giants, the mining companies and the corporate landlords.

We must imagine a new, different system beyond one that is merely a reformed version of our current neoliberal dystopia.

There are so many actions and necessary changes to our economic and political system that are touched on in this report. Ultimately, what Stiglitz has done through is categorically show how dangerous and extreme inequality has become, and make the case that we need an organised, confrontational political effort to challenge global financial capital and the techno-feudalists.

Download the summary report here.