The Good versus Bad Billionaires
Good billionaires emerge outside "rent-seeking industries."
Common rent-seeking industries are construction, real estate, gambling, mining, steel, aluminum, oil, gas and other commodity sectors that mainly involve digging resources out of the ground.
In these businesses, major players often spend their time extracting maximum rents from limited national resources by bribing politicians if necessary, not growing national wealth in innovative ways.
New names on the billionaire list can be a favourable sign. Looking at the scale of billionaire fortunes is not enough to reveal the extent of their political vulnerabilities.
Comparing the share of the wealth generated by "bad billionaires."
To make a qualitative judgement about the sources of great fortunes, compare the total wealth of tycoons in these corruption prone businesses to that of all billionaires in the country.
This no doubt miscasts many honest mining and oil tycoons, but even in nations where these industries are relatively uncorrupt, they tend to make weak contributions to productivity and to tie the economy to the volatile swings of commodity prices.
Good billionaires
This label is for tycoons in industries that are known to make the largest contributions to growth in productivity or that make popular consumer products, like smartphones or cars.
These "good" industries are the ones least likely to generate backlashes against wealth creation; they include technology, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and telecoms, as well as retail, e-commerce and entertainment.
How are nations generating their wealth?
Analysing billionaires does offer anecdotally telling, real-time evidence of how nations are generating wealth.
- Countries with small percentage of bad billionaires
Among the largest developed economies of 2019, bad billionaires controlled the smallest shares of billionaire wealth: in Italy (7%) and France(9%) - a good sign for both countries.
Only 13% of Swedish billionaire wealth originates in rent seeking industries. Much of the rest is created at globally competitive companies, including H&M in fashion and IKEA in furniture retailing.
- Countries with large percentage of bad billionaires
Few new or good billionaires are to be found in nations like Turkey or Russia, where aging regimes have turned away from reform and promoted favoured tycoons. The undisputed capital of connected tycoons is Moscow. Nearly 70% of Russian billionaire wealth comes from bad billionaires. The Kremlin treats billionaires with contempt, arbitrarily changing rules that govern their businesses knowing the public has little sympathy for a billionaire class widely perceived as corrupt.
Popular resentment against great wealth is palpable in Mexico as well, where bad billionaires also control close to 70% of billionaire wealth. Mexican tycoons are known for cornering industries such as telephones and concrete, which earn monopoly profits for their owners while driving up prices for consumers.
Bad billionaires typically arise in family empires, particularly in the emerging world, where weaker institutions make it easier for old families to cultivate political connections.
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