Our economic alchemy
By Khaled Diab
JK Rowling’s billion-dollar success is certainly awe inspiring, but has
she earned too much money?
August 2007
With 325 million
copies of the Harry Potter books already sold before the release of the latest
(which sold 11 million copies in the first 24 hours of publication) and the
movies coming in as the third-highest grossing film series ever, it can only
have been through some mysterious protective spell that I have remained immune
to the magic of the young sorcerer.
I must admit that I’m generally not interested
in children’s literature and having grown up on a diet of JRR Tolkien, from The Hobbit right through to The Silmarillion, I suspected I would only be disappointed
by the quality of Potter’s imaginary world when compared with the wonders of
Middle Earth.
Although I’m not interested in Harry, I have
grown somewhat fascinated in JK Rowling and her own philosopher’s stone. It is
not the elixir of life referred to in her book, but that
other magic property medieval alchemists attributed to this substance:
its ability to turn lead and other base metals into gold.
Rowling may not have turned lead into gold, but
she did transform a figment of her imagination into a bestseller and one of the
most lucrative franchises in entertainment. In the process, she went, in the
space of a decade, from single mum on the dole to the world’s second-richest
woman in entertainment and dollar billionaire (£485 million), according to Forbes.
As a writer, I naturally would not say no to
the prospect of writing a bestseller one day – in fact, my fictional bestseller has
been a running joke at home for some years.
Nevertheless, Rowling’s runaway success
illustrates a worrying trend regarding the global marketplace’s apparent
ability to magnify both economic success and failure.
English-speaking celebrities in particular have been riding a wave of
previously undreamt-of opulence. In fact, their affluence is almost effluent in its odour. Between them, the 100 highest-paid celebrities earned more than $3.1 billion, in
the 12 months to June 2007, with African-American talk show queen Oprah Winfrey
ruling the roost.
David Beckham, who has moved his royal court of
Beckingham palace to the LA hills, is believed to be
raking in half a million quid a week at
Together, the world’s 946 billionaires are worth a staggering $3.5
trillion – which sits between the annual GDP of Japan and
One reason why this kind of gap appears is that
while most of us depend on our labour to earn our daily bread, the superrich
have the magnifying effects of capital – and other people – bolstering their
fortunes. And such concentrations of capital interfere with the efficient
running of the economy and promote social inequality and tension.
