Across the globe, wealth levels have been growing at a much faster pace than economies.1 Private wealth is also increasingly unequally shared. In the UK, a tenth of households own 45 per cent of the nation’s wealth, while the least wealthy half of all households own just 9 per cent.2

The growth in the pool of privately owned wealth has been fuelled by two main trends: 1) inflation in asset prices, especially property, in part the product of the post-2008 financial stimulus through ‘quantitative easing’; and 2) significant transfer of public wealth into private hands through the rolling privatization of industry, natural resources, land and social housing. In the UK, public wealth holdings – from profitable state-owned enter- prises like the Land Registry and Ordnance Survey to the land and property portfolios owned by local authorities and public institutions like the NHS – account today for roughly a tenth of total wealth, a post-war low.3 What is left of the ‘family silver’ is insufficient to offset national levels of debt, leaving the UK as one of a handful of rich countries with a deficit on the public finance balance sheet.

This growing imbalance between private and public wealth has been one of the key drivers of rising inequality. As the authors of the influential World Inequality Report have argued, the ‘very large transfers of public to private wealth’ since 1980 have been a key determinant of rising wealth concentrations. The decline in the level of net public wealth to the current negative level, according to the report, ‘limits the ability of governments to mitigate inequality’.4 Because of this, it will not be possible to make a serious dent in today’s heightened levels of inequality without policies that boost the public’s share of national wealth.

Wealth, and its distribution, matters. High levels of wealth can be used to boost wider social and economic security. Personal wealth can encourage well-being. Publicly owned wealth provides wider society with a stream of income while helping to offset national liabilities, such as the national debt or public sector pensions. Yet, little of the surge in wealth levels has been harnessed for the public good.

With the considerable returns from ownership (in the form of profits, rents and dividends) accruing disproportionately to the already rich, leaving the asset-poor even further behind, ever greater wealth concentration is built into today’s dominant model of capitalism. Whereas public wealth holds the promise of benefiting all in society, corporate and private wealth only benefit the few. The current wealth mountain offers a huge potential resource for building a better society. But to access those resources means tackling the growing problem of wealth concentration, managing national assets more effectively, and finding new ways of spreading capital ownership more widely.

In the last few months, the maldistribution of wealth has been creeping onto the political agenda. Once calls for higher taxes on wealth would have been dismissed as anti-rich and politically impractical; yet a growing band of unlikely voices are now calling for this resource to be taxed more heavily for the public good.5 Even The Times newspaper, not always a friend of such ideas, has dipped its toe into the debate with a recent call to ‘shift taxation from income to wealth’.6