A newspaper headline over breakfast in Spain made me question something I’d never really considered before. When a country’s economy is booming, who actually owns the wealth that’s being created?
One of the unexpected pleasures of moving to Spain has been rediscovering the lost art of breakfast.
Most mornings I walk to my favourite café, order a café con leche and toasted bread rubbed with fresh tomato and olive oil, then spend half an hour simply watching the town wake up. The same waiter greets familiar faces with effortless warmth. Elderly couples linger over coffee. Shopkeepers raise their shutters. Sunburnt tourists wobble by. There is something reassuring about the rhythm of ordinary life here.
A few mornings ago, however, it wasn’t the people who caught my attention. It was a newspaper.
The gentleman at the next table was reading Expansión, Spain’s financial newspaper. Across the front page was a headline that immediately made me stop.
The real owners of the IBEX 35.
The real owners?
Surely Spain’s largest companies belong to Spain.
I finished my breakfast, but the question followed me home.
The Assumption
Like most people, I have spent much of my life assuming that when a country’s economy grows, its people become wealthier. I’ve lived in Germany for 16 years, which always provided me with the perfect example.
And that is how the news is usually presented.
The economy is booming.
Corporate profits are rising.
The stock market reaches another record.
We instinctively hear those as different ways of saying the same thing.
But they are not.
Companies create wealth where they operate.
Ownership determines where much of that wealth ultimately accumulates.
The distinction sounds almost trivial.
It isn’t.
It changes the way we think about almost everything.
Creating and Owning Wealth
Imagine two people.
One spends forty years working.
The other spends forty years owning.
The first helps create prosperity.
The second receives part of the return from that prosperity.
Sometimes, of course, they are the same person.
Often they are not.
That morning, as I watched the waiter carrying coffees from table to table, it occurred to me that he was helping to create Spain’s prosperity every bit as much as a hotel owner, a banker or a company director. Every tourist welcomed, every breakfast served and every day’s work honestly completed contributes, however modestly, to a nation’s success.
Yet if one of Spain’s largest companies doubles its profits this year, a significant share of those profits may eventually belong to people who have never set foot in Spain.
The wealth is created here.
The ownership may be somewhere else.
For some reason, that simple distinction had never really occurred to me before.
A Global Story
The more I reflected on it, the more I realised that Spain was merely the setting.
This is the story of the modern world.
Capital crosses borders far more easily than people do.
That freedom has transformed our lives. It has financed innovation, built industries, connected economies and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Few of us would seriously wish to reverse it.
Yet every system has consequences.
Perhaps the least discussed consequence of global capitalism is that it increasingly separates the place where wealth is created from the place where much of it is ultimately owned.
The two are no longer the same thing.
Britain Taught Me the Lesson Before Spain Did
Ironically, Britain had been teaching me this lesson for decades without my noticing.
Successive governments sold companies, utilities, railways, airports, property and infrastructure into private and often international ownership. We were told that this was modernisation, efficiency and the price of attracting investment. In many respects, it was.
Investment creates jobs.
Investment raises productivity.
Investment helps economies grow.
But every sale also carried another consequence.
A little more of tomorrow’s income would belong to someone else. And if the quality of a service such as buses and railways deteriorates in Manchester when the company owners sit in an office along the Champs Elysées, we should not be too surprised.
At the same time, Britain itself became a major owner of overseas assets. Pension funds, investment companies and multinational businesses accumulated wealth around the world. Perhaps that is one reason Britain has continued to generate considerable income despite producing far fewer of the manufactured goods that once defined its economy.
I had simply never connected those two facts before.
The newspaper in Spain finally joined the dots for me.
The Conversation We Rarely Have About Wealth
Political arguments usually revolve around wages, taxation or redistribution.
The left asks how wealth should be shared.
The right asks how more wealth can be created.
Both debates matter.
But perhaps they both overlook an earlier question.
Who owns the wealth before anyone starts arguing about how to redistribute it?
That seems to me to be one of the defining questions of our age.
Not because ownership should be concentrated within national borders.
Nor because global investment is somehow undesirable.
But because ownership itself has become strangely invisible.
Millions of people spend entire careers helping to create wealth while accumulating very little ownership of the economy they are helping to build.
They earn incomes.
But wages and ownership are not the same thing.
One pays today’s bills.
The other builds tomorrow’s security.
A Fairer Form of Globalisation
I have no desire to retreat into economic nationalism.
The extraordinary prosperity of the modern world owes much to capital flowing freely across borders. The challenge, surely, is not to make investment less global but ownership less exclusive.
Economic growth should not become a spectator sport in which millions of people spend their lives creating wealth they will never meaningfully own.
A healthy economy should produce not only better wages but broader ownership, because ownership is what allows one generation’s work to become the next generation’s security.
That does not require abandoning global markets.
It requires asking whether ordinary citizens have enough opportunities to become long-term owners of the prosperity they spend their lives creating.
What if governments devoted as much energy to widening ownership as they currently devote to encouraging growth?
What if employee share ownership became the norm rather than the exception?
What if ordinary citizens found it easier to build long-term stakes in productive businesses through pension funds, savings schemes and investment accounts?
What if the people whose daily work creates prosperity gradually came to own a larger share of that prosperity?
That strikes me as a far more constructive ambition than trying to turn back the clock on globalisation.
I still remember folding that newspaper and taking one last sip of coffee before walking home.
The headline had answered one question.
But it had raised another.
When we say that a country’s economy is booming, we usually ask how much wealth has been created.
Perhaps the more important question is one we almost never ask.
Who really owns the wealth that a nation’s workforce is creating?
“The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.”
— John Maynard Keynes