Researcher Hendrik Bessembinder and colleagues studied more than 60,000 listed stocks worldwide since 1990. The result: fewer than 3% of companies account for all the net wealth created on stock markets over the period, and more than half of stocks did worse than plain US Treasury bills. Stock market gains are extremely concentrated in a few big winners.
That's the estimate from a WHO-led study published in The Lancet in 2024, covering the half-century since the Expanded Programme on Immunization was launched in 1974. It works out to about six lives saved every minute, mostly infants. The measles vaccine alone accounts for around 60% of those lives.
According to the World Gold Council, about 216,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in all of human history. Because gold is so dense (19.3 tonnes per cubic metre), it would fit in a cube about 22 metres on each side, roughly the height of a seven-storey building. Strikingly, about two-thirds of it has been mined since 1950.