Summary:
- Wealth inequality persists because the poor lack ownership of appreciating assets: While the global economy has grown significantly, most wealth accrues to those who own assets (like property or equity), leaving the poor, who rely primarily on wages, unable to meaningfully close the gap.
- Income-based poverty solutions have limits; ownership enables compounding gains: Wages grow slowly and linearly, whereas assets compound over time. This means even successful income interventions often fail to create lasting prosperity without pathways to ownership.
- Philanthropy can accelerate prosperity by enabling asset ownership: By investing in models like employee ownership, land rights, cooperative housing, and savings vehicles, philanthropic capital can help the poor build wealth, increase economic participation, and shift how individuals engage with economic systems.
It’s quite simple. The way most of us have built wealth is by owning things that grow in value while we sleep, play, and spend time with our loved ones. What if philanthropy focused on helping the poor own similar things?
Today, the richest 10% of people capture approximately half of all global income and own roughly 76% of global wealth. The bottom 50% take home 8% of global income and hold only two percent of global wealth. The data is worse in low- and middle-income countries where there are few good jobs and even fewer ways for people to own assets that can appreciate in value over time. For instance, in Africa approximately 80% of women in the workforce are engaged in vulnerable employment–jobs that lack social protection, safety nets, or security to guard against economic shocks—making them more susceptible to falling into poverty. In Nigeria, just 2.5% of Nigerian women own a home by themselves, and 6.6% own one jointly.
Despite the global economy growing more than tenfold since 1980, from $11 trillion to more than $110 trillion today, only 7% of the global population live on more than $50 a day (roughly $18,250 a year). That amount is barely above the poverty guideline for a single person in the United States. Even as the world grows richer in aggregate, too many people remain unable to benefit from this abundance. This rising inequality is undermining confidence in capitalism and market-based solutions to the world’s many challenges.
Yet, capitalism remains the best system for moving people from poverty to prosperity, and philanthropic capital can accelerate that movement.
Most poor people don’t own assets, much less assets that appreciate over time like homes, shares in companies, or land. What if half of the roughly $1 trillion in philanthropic capital deployed globally each year were invested in ways that helped the poor own assets that appreciate over time?
For example, philanthropic capital can turbocharge the employee ownership movement currently underway. This could have significant ripple effects on people’s lives and entire economies. Research suggests that “employee-owned businesses contribute to higher job quality for workers in aspects from salary and benefits to job satisfaction and a sense of empowerment. On the business side, employee-owned companies demonstrate higher productivity, lower turnover, and greater resilience in the face of economic headwinds, and employee ownership may reduce labor-management conflict by aligning incentives.”
Consider how these two factors highlight the importance of this thinking.
First, incomes grow roughly linearly while asset values (capital) compound. The value of a stock or a home can increase by 50% in one year. A salary almost never does. Over the long run, capital has returned four to five percent annually while wage growth has averaged closer to 1.5 percent. This gap is why the rich, who hold most of the assets, keep pulling away, and why the poor, who hold almost none, can work hard for a lifetime and still end up with little.
This is also why income-focused poverty programs hit an impact ceiling. When incomes start from a low bar, often less than four dollars a day, percentage gains can hide how little is actually changing. A program that doubles the income of someone earning $100 a month over a decade is a rare and remarkable success on paper. In practice, the person still earns just $200 a month. The simple math of low bases means income gains alone cannot close the gap.
Second, ownership changes how people relate to the systems they participate in. Research on employee ownership consistently finds higher job satisfaction, lower turnover, and greater productivity. But there’s also a deeper psychological effect. When employees own part of the firm where they work, they invest more in their workplaces, their communities, and their own skills. By giving the poor a stake in what they are building, philanthropy can change the trust equation in poor economies, where most people experience the economy as something done to them rather than something they own.
Employee ownership is one model but there are others. Land trusts can put titles in the hands of smallholder farmers, programs that help informal-sector workers acquire equity in the firms they support and effectively build over time, cooperative housing schemes can turn renters into owners, and savings and investment vehicles can give the poor a real on-ramp to capital markets. All these initiatives can have an exponential impact on the lives of the poor.
Philanthropy could fund the slow, structural, and often unglamorous work of helping poor people own things that grow in value while they sleep. This is what has helped many of us achieve and grow our wealth over time. With focus and foresight, we can afford the poor the same opportunity.
