Irish Examiner view: Wealth divide may destabilise our world

That an Irish subsidiary of Apple paid dividends of almost $250bn to its US parent last year. Picture: Dan Linehan

Statistics, the correlation of data describing our lives, can be sobering shorthand for what happens in our world. They can, in the most succinct, unexpected ways, describe how power constantly shifts.

They can, maybe better than any historian, describe how empires rise and fall. One statistic, detailing how China pours more concrete every three years than the US did in the 20th century, says far, far more than anything about runaway construction in China.