Wealth inequality has risen to stratospheric heights. The statistics, the real statistics, sound like fragments spun off from a madman's dream.

Eighty-five people have as much money as three and a half billion other people. Look at it like this: 85 people = 3,500,000,000 people.

Forbes Magazine, which used to gleefully refer to itself as a "capitalist tool," creates an annual list of the richest 400 people in the world. Ten years ago, their combined wealth was $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars). Now, after a world wide crash and all sort of bailouts, their combined worth is $2,000,000,000,000. They've doubled their money. How've you done?

Capitalism is at risk of destroying itself unless bankers realise they have an obligation to create a fairer society, the Bank of England governor has warned.

Mark Carney said bankers had operated a "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" system. He questioned whether traders met ethical standards and said that those who failed to meet high professional standards should face ostracism.

Speaking at a City conference, the Bank's governor warned that there was a growing sense that the basic social contract at the heart of capitalism was breaking down amid rising inequality. "We simply cannot take the capitalist system, which produces such plenty and so many solutions, for granted. Prosperity requires not just investment in economic capital, but investment in social capital."

More than half of the developing world's workers are trapped in vulnerable jobs, working for themselves or in unpaid family work, according to a report that calls for better quality employment to drive economic growth.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) also highlights an urgent need for 200m new jobs in emerging countries in its annual World of Work report. Without them, young people will be worst hit as youth unemployment rates soar even higher above the jobless rate for all adults, it warns.

The United Nations agency uses its flagship report this year to underscore what it sees as a link between secure, fairly paid work and more stable economic growth in developing countries.

Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham.

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It's 2.5 billion billion solar systems. It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.

To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues miraculously vanished, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.