“The lawyers and corporate elites who draft and enact the legislation and regulations that govern globalisation are disconnected from those who are supposed to implement the policies at the local level”

benefited most from globalised markets.

So what is fueling inequality? To answer that question, we must consider what about globalization is generating returns for the wealthy.

A central aspect of globalisation is the careful documentation of the knowledge and legal tools needed to combine the property rights of seemingly useless single assets (electronic parts, legal rights to production, and so on) into complex wholes (an iPhone), and appropriate the surplus value they generate. Clear and accessible ledgers that faithfully describe not only who controls what and where, but also the rules governing potential combinations – of, say, collateral, components, producers, entrepreneurs, and legal and property rights – are vital for the system to function.

The problem is that five billion people around the world are not documented in national ledgers in anything approaching an organised manner. Instead, their entrepreneurial talents and legal rights to assets are recorded in hundreds of scattered records and rules systems throughout their countries, making them internationally inaccessible.

Under these conditions, it is impossible for the majority of humanity to participate effectively in their national economies, much less the global one. Without any means of