When it comes to the World Economic Forum in Davos, it’s inequality, stupid
- Thread starter FAH1223
- Start date
Inequality is catnip to people who think they know what they're talking about
Its the perfect buzzword for the elite to give you something to chew on while nothing change.s
If you were smart, you'd understand what I'm saying, but alas you're stuck on trying to pretend these people care about you.
ORDER_66
The Fire Rises 2023
nah you just have to follow it through to the website.
There's a link that says "watch on youtube"
You're not really missing out, it's just people protesting 45.....
ZoeGod
I’m from Brooklyn a place where stars are born.
What are you talking about? The UN filed a report saying the GOP tax bill will make income inequality worse. The fact that American work productivity has gone up 70% since the 1960s and yet wages are stagnant is a major problem. The GOP tax bill has essentially given the wealthy a permanent tax cut. Meanwhile we have temporary tactics cut and see taxes rates go higher by 2027. And inequality is an issue as the cost of of basic needs like food,housing,healthcare are getting high while incomes have remained the same. To said inequality isn't a major issue sounds very elitist and shows disdain for the working poor and middle class.
I didn't say it wasn't a major issue.
I said the phrasing and dialogue around it was marginalia and specious.
Keep up.
@ZoeGod @FAH1223 @Mook @Serious @DEAD7 @AndroidHero @James Hurley @ORDER_66
This article outlines why "inequality" talk is largely such a sham. GLOBALLY things appear to be getting better. But just using weird statistical formulations isn't helping.
Remember...this is OXFAM
https://causeandeffect.kinja.com/oxfams-excellent-inequality-report-1822314028
Oxfam's excellent inequality report
Felix SalmonMonday 5:58pm
Via Oxfam
It’s the first day of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, which means that Oxfam is releasing its annual shame-the-rich report. I’ve been rude about this report in the past, because I don’t believe that statistics of the form “the top X has as much wealth as the bottom Y” are particularly enlightening or helpful. After all, according to the standard methodology, my niece, who just got her first 50 cents in pocket money, has more money than the poorest 2 billion people in the world combined.
This year, however, Oxfam has switched tack. While their 76-page report does spend a little bit of time adding up the wealth of the poor, that’s not the focus, and as far as I can tell they’re no longer putting a huge amount of marketing muscle behind viral images featuring misleading statistics.
I give them a lot of credit for this, because outrage does sell. The annual Oxfam inequality report is one of the organization’s most significant global fundraisers, and by making it more serious and less virally punchy, they’re potentially leaving many millions of dollars on the table.
Maybe Oxfam is realizing that substance beats sound bites. This annual briefing has never been anything like 76 pages long before: as recently as 2015, it was just 12 pages long. Most people won’t read the whole report, of course, but they should, because it’s a powerful indictment of the forces exacerbating global inequality, backed up with real on-the-ground reporting.
Oxfam has also changed the main frame of the report: rather than concentrating on the total amount of wealth being held by the rich and the poor, they’re looking at the increase in the total amount of wealth held by the rich. I’ve always been OK with adding up the wealth of the rich, and looking at an annual increase is a great way of demonstrating just how enormous the returns to capital were in 2017. Of course, if stocks had gone down instead of up, those returns would have been negative, and Oxfam would have concentrated on something else. But at the end of this crazy bull market, it’s always worth remembering just how enormous the big winners’ gains have been.
Specifically, the world’s billionaires – the richest 2,000 people on the planet – saw their wealth increase by a staggering $762 billion in just one year. That’s an average of $381 million apiece. If those billionaires had simply been content with staying at their 2016 wealth, and had given their one-year gains to the world’s poorest people instead, then extreme poverty would have been eradicated. Hell, they could have eradicated extreme poverty, at least in theory, by giving up just one seventh of their annual gains.
Oxfam is absolutely right, then, to shine a light on the extreme inequality of the world in 2017. Wealth creation is all well and good, but giving new wealth primarily to the world’s billionaires is literally the worst possible way to distribute it. Oxfam’s longstanding proposal for a wealth tax on billionaires makes perfect sense. They don’t need the money; the world’s poorest do. What’s more, as the Oxfam report details, the top 1% too often make their money by exploiting the very poor. Nothing about this is just, especially when a good 35% of billionaire wealth was simply inherited.
It’s also good to see Oxfam looking at various measures of income inequality, rather than concentrating overwhelmingly on the more problematic wealth inequality figures. (Wealth, after all, is basically deferred consumption; there’s no good reason why anybody would want most of the world to be deferring significant amounts of consumption, especially if they’re poor.) I’m also heartened to see the organization being very open about the fact that global inequality is going down, even as national inequality, in the overwhelming majority of the world’s countries, is going up.
So, well done Oxfam for getting it right this year. Still, there is one thing I would have liked to see more explicitly. Oxfam’s wealth statistics come from Credit Suisse, and this year Credit Suisse found an extra $8 trillion of wealth, mostly in India, China, and Russia, that it hadn’t previously counted. A lot of that wealth, it turns out, is owned by people in the bottom 50%.
The result is that the net wealth of the bottom 50% of the world’s population, which was estimated at $4o9 billion this time last year, has now been revised up to an estimated $1.581 trillion. That’s a huge increase. Divided between 3.7 billion people, average net wealth for the bottom 50% is no longer $110 per person, as we thought last year, but rather $427 per person. That’s a really big difference, and it means that last year’s statistic of 8 men having the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50% of the world’s population is clearly not true.
Let’s pause for a minute, then, to celebrate the fact that the poorer half of the planet turns out to be not nearly as poor as we thought it was. But then, let’s keep on fighting inequality. Which remains one of the defining fights of our era.
This article outlines why "inequality" talk is largely such a sham. GLOBALLY things appear to be getting better. But just using weird statistical formulations isn't helping.
Remember...this is OXFAM
https://causeandeffect.kinja.com/oxfams-excellent-inequality-report-1822314028
Oxfam's excellent inequality report
Felix SalmonMonday 5:58pm
Via Oxfam
It’s the first day of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, which means that Oxfam is releasing its annual shame-the-rich report. I’ve been rude about this report in the past, because I don’t believe that statistics of the form “the top X has as much wealth as the bottom Y” are particularly enlightening or helpful. After all, according to the standard methodology, my niece, who just got her first 50 cents in pocket money, has more money than the poorest 2 billion people in the world combined.
This year, however, Oxfam has switched tack. While their 76-page report does spend a little bit of time adding up the wealth of the poor, that’s not the focus, and as far as I can tell they’re no longer putting a huge amount of marketing muscle behind viral images featuring misleading statistics.
I give them a lot of credit for this, because outrage does sell. The annual Oxfam inequality report is one of the organization’s most significant global fundraisers, and by making it more serious and less virally punchy, they’re potentially leaving many millions of dollars on the table.
Maybe Oxfam is realizing that substance beats sound bites. This annual briefing has never been anything like 76 pages long before: as recently as 2015, it was just 12 pages long. Most people won’t read the whole report, of course, but they should, because it’s a powerful indictment of the forces exacerbating global inequality, backed up with real on-the-ground reporting.
Oxfam has also changed the main frame of the report: rather than concentrating on the total amount of wealth being held by the rich and the poor, they’re looking at the increase in the total amount of wealth held by the rich. I’ve always been OK with adding up the wealth of the rich, and looking at an annual increase is a great way of demonstrating just how enormous the returns to capital were in 2017. Of course, if stocks had gone down instead of up, those returns would have been negative, and Oxfam would have concentrated on something else. But at the end of this crazy bull market, it’s always worth remembering just how enormous the big winners’ gains have been.
Specifically, the world’s billionaires – the richest 2,000 people on the planet – saw their wealth increase by a staggering $762 billion in just one year. That’s an average of $381 million apiece. If those billionaires had simply been content with staying at their 2016 wealth, and had given their one-year gains to the world’s poorest people instead, then extreme poverty would have been eradicated. Hell, they could have eradicated extreme poverty, at least in theory, by giving up just one seventh of their annual gains.
Oxfam is absolutely right, then, to shine a light on the extreme inequality of the world in 2017. Wealth creation is all well and good, but giving new wealth primarily to the world’s billionaires is literally the worst possible way to distribute it. Oxfam’s longstanding proposal for a wealth tax on billionaires makes perfect sense. They don’t need the money; the world’s poorest do. What’s more, as the Oxfam report details, the top 1% too often make their money by exploiting the very poor. Nothing about this is just, especially when a good 35% of billionaire wealth was simply inherited.
It’s also good to see Oxfam looking at various measures of income inequality, rather than concentrating overwhelmingly on the more problematic wealth inequality figures. (Wealth, after all, is basically deferred consumption; there’s no good reason why anybody would want most of the world to be deferring significant amounts of consumption, especially if they’re poor.) I’m also heartened to see the organization being very open about the fact that global inequality is going down, even as national inequality, in the overwhelming majority of the world’s countries, is going up.
So, well done Oxfam for getting it right this year. Still, there is one thing I would have liked to see more explicitly. Oxfam’s wealth statistics come from Credit Suisse, and this year Credit Suisse found an extra $8 trillion of wealth, mostly in India, China, and Russia, that it hadn’t previously counted. A lot of that wealth, it turns out, is owned by people in the bottom 50%.
The result is that the net wealth of the bottom 50% of the world’s population, which was estimated at $4o9 billion this time last year, has now been revised up to an estimated $1.581 trillion. That’s a huge increase. Divided between 3.7 billion people, average net wealth for the bottom 50% is no longer $110 per person, as we thought last year, but rather $427 per person. That’s a really big difference, and it means that last year’s statistic of 8 men having the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50% of the world’s population is clearly not true.
Let’s pause for a minute, then, to celebrate the fact that the poorer half of the planet turns out to be not nearly as poor as we thought it was. But then, let’s keep on fighting inequality. Which remains one of the defining fights of our era.
@ZoeGod @FAH1223 @Mook @Serious @DEAD7 @AndroidHero @James Hurley @ORDER_66
This article outlines why "inequality" talk is largely such a sham. GLOBALLY things appear to be getting better. But just using weird statistical formulations isn't helping.
Remember...this is OXFAM
https://causeandeffect.kinja.com/oxfams-excellent-inequality-report-1822314028
Oxfam's excellent inequality report
Felix SalmonMonday 5:58pm
Via Oxfam
It’s the first day of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, which means that Oxfam is releasing its annual shame-the-rich report. I’ve been rude about this report in the past, because I don’t believe that statistics of the form “the top X has as much wealth as the bottom Y” are particularly enlightening or helpful. After all, according to the standard methodology, my niece, who just got her first 50 cents in pocket money, has more money than the poorest 2 billion people in the world combined.
This year, however, Oxfam has switched tack. While their 76-page report does spend a little bit of time adding up the wealth of the poor, that’s not the focus, and as far as I can tell they’re no longer putting a huge amount of marketing muscle behind viral images featuring misleading statistics.
I give them a lot of credit for this, because outrage does sell. The annual Oxfam inequality report is one of the organization’s most significant global fundraisers, and by making it more serious and less virally punchy, they’re potentially leaving many millions of dollars on the table.
Maybe Oxfam is realizing that substance beats sound bites. This annual briefing has never been anything like 76 pages long before: as recently as 2015, it was just 12 pages long. Most people won’t read the whole report, of course, but they should, because it’s a powerful indictment of the forces exacerbating global inequality, backed up with real on-the-ground reporting.
Oxfam has also changed the main frame of the report: rather than concentrating on the total amount of wealth being held by the rich and the poor, they’re looking at the increase in the total amount of wealth held by the rich. I’ve always been OK with adding up the wealth of the rich, and looking at an annual increase is a great way of demonstrating just how enormous the returns to capital were in 2017. Of course, if stocks had gone down instead of up, those returns would have been negative, and Oxfam would have concentrated on something else. But at the end of this crazy bull market, it’s always worth remembering just how enormous the big winners’ gains have been.
Specifically, the world’s billionaires – the richest 2,000 people on the planet – saw their wealth increase by a staggering $762 billion in just one year. That’s an average of $381 million apiece. If those billionaires had simply been content with staying at their 2016 wealth, and had given their one-year gains to the world’s poorest people instead, then extreme poverty would have been eradicated. Hell, they could have eradicated extreme poverty, at least in theory, by giving up just one seventh of their annual gains.
Oxfam is absolutely right, then, to shine a light on the extreme inequality of the world in 2017. Wealth creation is all well and good, but giving new wealth primarily to the world’s billionaires is literally the worst possible way to distribute it. Oxfam’s longstanding proposal for a wealth tax on billionaires makes perfect sense. They don’t need the money; the world’s poorest do. What’s more, as the Oxfam report details, the top 1% too often make their money by exploiting the very poor. Nothing about this is just, especially when a good 35% of billionaire wealth was simply inherited.
It’s also good to see Oxfam looking at various measures of income inequality, rather than concentrating overwhelmingly on the more problematic wealth inequality figures. (Wealth, after all, is basically deferred consumption; there’s no good reason why anybody would want most of the world to be deferring significant amounts of consumption, especially if they’re poor.) I’m also heartened to see the organization being very open about the fact that global inequality is going down, even as national inequality, in the overwhelming majority of the world’s countries, is going up.
So, well done Oxfam for getting it right this year. Still, there is one thing I would have liked to see more explicitly. Oxfam’s wealth statistics come from Credit Suisse, and this year Credit Suisse found an extra $8 trillion of wealth, mostly in India, China, and Russia, that it hadn’t previously counted. A lot of that wealth, it turns out, is owned by people in the bottom 50%.
The result is that the net wealth of the bottom 50% of the world’s population, which was estimated at $4o9 billion this time last year, has now been revised up to an estimated $1.581 trillion. That’s a huge increase. Divided between 3.7 billion people, average net wealth for the bottom 50% is no longer $110 per person, as we thought last year, but rather $427 per person. That’s a really big difference, and it means that last year’s statistic of 8 men having the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50% of the world’s population is clearly not true.
Let’s pause for a minute, then, to celebrate the fact that the poorer half of the planet turns out to be not nearly as poor as we thought it was. But then, let’s keep on fighting inequality. Which remains one of the defining fights of our era.
I'm stupid, but I'm pretty sure this article did not help you.
You're going to have to try harder than this.I'm stupid, but I'm pretty sure this article did not help you.
Even the most left wing anti-rich charities and publications have to revamp how they discuss "inequality" from merely tallying up how much wealth exists, but rather how much relative shifts in wealth occur.
Clearly you didn't read it.
@ZoeGod @FAH1223 @Mook @Serious @DEAD7 @AndroidHero @James Hurley @ORDER_66
Another example of why the "inequality" talk at places like DAVOS is empty posturing:
Opinion | Davos Man is nervous. He should be.
Davos Man is nervous. He should be.
Davos Man, that private-jet-taking, international-trade-dealing, easily caricatured master of the universe, is nervous.
This was clear even before he arrived this week in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, the exclusive annual meeting where the elites of finance, industry and governance mingle to discuss topics of global interest.
Just days ahead of the confab, Larry Fink, chief executive of the $6 trillion-plus asset management firm BlackRock and prototypical Davos attendee, made clear his own doubts about our economic future. “Popular frustration and apprehension about the future simultaneously have reached new heights. We are seeing the paradox of high returns and high anxiety,” Fink declared in his annual letter to thousands of top business leaders. Noting the low wage growth, dimming retirement prospects and other financial pressures that squeeze too many across the globe, he said, “I believe that these trends are a major source of the anxiety and polarization that we see across the world today.”
What is the Precariat? One economist says they'll help bring about a political revolution
What should be done about this? Fink made some recommendations: “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”
The BlackRock letter suggests that the current economic system, which has come to prioritize corporate gains and private growth above all, sees trouble ahead and is looking for ways to save itself. That animating worry is visible in the titles of sessions on the Davos schedule (Day 1 panels: “How Is Rentier Capitalism Aggravating Inequality?” and “Why Is Our World Fractured?”). And the same realization has threaded the pronouncements of the other industry and political leaders in attendance.
Clearly, all the fretting is justified. Stock markets may be at record highs, but the good times can’t last forever — especially if their benefits accrue only to a select, highly visible few. The pitch of worry increases whenever a reminder arises. Nearly every time a report about the advance of income inequality comes out — the most recent, from Oxfam last week, stated that 82 percent of all wealth created in 2017 went to the global top 1 percent — one can almost feel collars being nervously pulled in office towers around the world.
Yet it doesn’t quite seem that Fink and others of the Davos elite are worried enough.
In an interview upon his arrival at the forum, less than a week after his cautionary missive went out, the BlackRock CEO appeared to temper his call for a devotion to social purpose. To reporters from CNBC, Fink noted: “The most important thing I said, and I repeated maybe three times. . . . Profits are paramount to everything a company does.”
But that’s precisely the outlook that has gotten them into this mess. It will have to be rethought — and perhaps discarded — if the popular frustration and upheaval disturbing the sleep of Davos Man are to be mitigated.
For several decades, in large part because of the influence of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, global elites have understood corporations to have one responsibility: maximizing shareholder value. This view has led to the jettisoning of the same responsibility to society at large that Fink and those of his set now warn is needed. That diminution of a larger duty has led predictably to the resentment that the Davos elites suddenly eye with such concern.
Yes, it is possible to rebuild popular faith in the global economy and the role that corporations play in the world. But it will take more than an open letter, later walked back, to an audience of lukewarm peers. Companies such as BlackRock will need to change their business practices to become more tangibly pro-social — and in ways that are visible to those who aren’t in attendance at exclusive alpine events. Even marginal shifts in corporate behavior and the flow of capital could have enormous impact, but that would require a new approach to business that considers more than just the bottom line. Are asset managers such as Fink prepared to steer clear of lucrative but anti-social investment opportunities? How about a new openness to regulation and oversight? To avoid higher scrutiny, BlackRock lobbied aggressively to keep from being labeled “systemically important” under post-financial-crisis U.S. reforms. Perhaps it might just admit that it is.
Will such shifts take place? It’s difficult to say. The economic system hasn’t come crashing down quite yet, and it’s far easier to talk the talk than walk the walk. Davos Man may be nervous, but it doesn’t yet sound as though he’s nervous enough to change.
Read more:
Ed Rogers: Maybe Trump has a new message for Davos
Niall Ferguson: Trump exemplifies the Ugly American. Davos will accept him anyway.
Christine Emba: Outrage is not enough
Another example of why the "inequality" talk at places like DAVOS is empty posturing:
Opinion | Davos Man is nervous. He should be.
Davos Man is nervous. He should be.
Davos Man, that private-jet-taking, international-trade-dealing, easily caricatured master of the universe, is nervous.
This was clear even before he arrived this week in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, the exclusive annual meeting where the elites of finance, industry and governance mingle to discuss topics of global interest.
Just days ahead of the confab, Larry Fink, chief executive of the $6 trillion-plus asset management firm BlackRock and prototypical Davos attendee, made clear his own doubts about our economic future. “Popular frustration and apprehension about the future simultaneously have reached new heights. We are seeing the paradox of high returns and high anxiety,” Fink declared in his annual letter to thousands of top business leaders. Noting the low wage growth, dimming retirement prospects and other financial pressures that squeeze too many across the globe, he said, “I believe that these trends are a major source of the anxiety and polarization that we see across the world today.”
What is the Precariat? One economist says they'll help bring about a political revolution
What should be done about this? Fink made some recommendations: “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”
The BlackRock letter suggests that the current economic system, which has come to prioritize corporate gains and private growth above all, sees trouble ahead and is looking for ways to save itself. That animating worry is visible in the titles of sessions on the Davos schedule (Day 1 panels: “How Is Rentier Capitalism Aggravating Inequality?” and “Why Is Our World Fractured?”). And the same realization has threaded the pronouncements of the other industry and political leaders in attendance.
Clearly, all the fretting is justified. Stock markets may be at record highs, but the good times can’t last forever — especially if their benefits accrue only to a select, highly visible few. The pitch of worry increases whenever a reminder arises. Nearly every time a report about the advance of income inequality comes out — the most recent, from Oxfam last week, stated that 82 percent of all wealth created in 2017 went to the global top 1 percent — one can almost feel collars being nervously pulled in office towers around the world.
Yet it doesn’t quite seem that Fink and others of the Davos elite are worried enough.
In an interview upon his arrival at the forum, less than a week after his cautionary missive went out, the BlackRock CEO appeared to temper his call for a devotion to social purpose. To reporters from CNBC, Fink noted: “The most important thing I said, and I repeated maybe three times. . . . Profits are paramount to everything a company does.”
But that’s precisely the outlook that has gotten them into this mess. It will have to be rethought — and perhaps discarded — if the popular frustration and upheaval disturbing the sleep of Davos Man are to be mitigated.
For several decades, in large part because of the influence of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, global elites have understood corporations to have one responsibility: maximizing shareholder value. This view has led to the jettisoning of the same responsibility to society at large that Fink and those of his set now warn is needed. That diminution of a larger duty has led predictably to the resentment that the Davos elites suddenly eye with such concern.
Yes, it is possible to rebuild popular faith in the global economy and the role that corporations play in the world. But it will take more than an open letter, later walked back, to an audience of lukewarm peers. Companies such as BlackRock will need to change their business practices to become more tangibly pro-social — and in ways that are visible to those who aren’t in attendance at exclusive alpine events. Even marginal shifts in corporate behavior and the flow of capital could have enormous impact, but that would require a new approach to business that considers more than just the bottom line. Are asset managers such as Fink prepared to steer clear of lucrative but anti-social investment opportunities? How about a new openness to regulation and oversight? To avoid higher scrutiny, BlackRock lobbied aggressively to keep from being labeled “systemically important” under post-financial-crisis U.S. reforms. Perhaps it might just admit that it is.
Will such shifts take place? It’s difficult to say. The economic system hasn’t come crashing down quite yet, and it’s far easier to talk the talk than walk the walk. Davos Man may be nervous, but it doesn’t yet sound as though he’s nervous enough to change.
Read more:
Ed Rogers: Maybe Trump has a new message for Davos
Niall Ferguson: Trump exemplifies the Ugly American. Davos will accept him anyway.
Christine Emba: Outrage is not enough
ZoeGod
I’m from Brooklyn a place where stars are born.
@ZoeGod @FAH1223 @Mook @Serious @DEAD7 @AndroidHero @James Hurley @ORDER_66
This article outlines why "inequality" talk is largely such a sham. GLOBALLY things appear to be getting better. But just using weird statistical formulations isn't helping.
Remember...this is OXFAM
https://causeandeffect.kinja.com/oxfams-excellent-inequality-report-1822314028
Oxfam's excellent inequality report
Felix SalmonMonday 5:58pm
Via Oxfam
It’s the first day of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, which means that Oxfam is releasing its annual shame-the-rich report. I’ve been rude about this report in the past, because I don’t believe that statistics of the form “the top X has as much wealth as the bottom Y” are particularly enlightening or helpful. After all, according to the standard methodology, my niece, who just got her first 50 cents in pocket money, has more money than the poorest 2 billion people in the world combined.
This year, however, Oxfam has switched tack. While their 76-page report does spend a little bit of time adding up the wealth of the poor, that’s not the focus, and as far as I can tell they’re no longer putting a huge amount of marketing muscle behind viral images featuring misleading statistics.
I give them a lot of credit for this, because outrage does sell. The annual Oxfam inequality report is one of the organization’s most significant global fundraisers, and by making it more serious and less virally punchy, they’re potentially leaving many millions of dollars on the table.
Maybe Oxfam is realizing that substance beats sound bites. This annual briefing has never been anything like 76 pages long before: as recently as 2015, it was just 12 pages long. Most people won’t read the whole report, of course, but they should, because it’s a powerful indictment of the forces exacerbating global inequality, backed up with real on-the-ground reporting.
Oxfam has also changed the main frame of the report: rather than concentrating on the total amount of wealth being held by the rich and the poor, they’re looking at the increase in the total amount of wealth held by the rich. I’ve always been OK with adding up the wealth of the rich, and looking at an annual increase is a great way of demonstrating just how enormous the returns to capital were in 2017. Of course, if stocks had gone down instead of up, those returns would have been negative, and Oxfam would have concentrated on something else. But at the end of this crazy bull market, it’s always worth remembering just how enormous the big winners’ gains have been.
Specifically, the world’s billionaires – the richest 2,000 people on the planet – saw their wealth increase by a staggering $762 billion in just one year. That’s an average of $381 million apiece. If those billionaires had simply been content with staying at their 2016 wealth, and had given their one-year gains to the world’s poorest people instead, then extreme poverty would have been eradicated. Hell, they could have eradicated extreme poverty, at least in theory, by giving up just one seventh of their annual gains.
Oxfam is absolutely right, then, to shine a light on the extreme inequality of the world in 2017. Wealth creation is all well and good, but giving new wealth primarily to the world’s billionaires is literally the worst possible way to distribute it. Oxfam’s longstanding proposal for a wealth tax on billionaires makes perfect sense. They don’t need the money; the world’s poorest do. What’s more, as the Oxfam report details, the top 1% too often make their money by exploiting the very poor. Nothing about this is just, especially when a good 35% of billionaire wealth was simply inherited.
It’s also good to see Oxfam looking at various measures of income inequality, rather than concentrating overwhelmingly on the more problematic wealth inequality figures. (Wealth, after all, is basically deferred consumption; there’s no good reason why anybody would want most of the world to be deferring significant amounts of consumption, especially if they’re poor.) I’m also heartened to see the organization being very open about the fact that global inequality is going down, even as national inequality, in the overwhelming majority of the world’s countries, is going up.
So, well done Oxfam for getting it right this year. Still, there is one thing I would have liked to see more explicitly. Oxfam’s wealth statistics come from Credit Suisse, and this year Credit Suisse found an extra $8 trillion of wealth, mostly in India, China, and Russia, that it hadn’t previously counted. A lot of that wealth, it turns out, is owned by people in the bottom 50%.
The result is that the net wealth of the bottom 50% of the world’s population, which was estimated at $4o9 billion this time last year, has now been revised up to an estimated $1.581 trillion. That’s a huge increase. Divided between 3.7 billion people, average net wealth for the bottom 50% is no longer $110 per person, as we thought last year, but rather $427 per person. That’s a really big difference, and it means that last year’s statistic of 8 men having the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50% of the world’s population is clearly not true.
Let’s pause for a minute, then, to celebrate the fact that the poorer half of the planet turns out to be not nearly as poor as we thought it was. But then, let’s keep on fighting inequality. Which remains one of the defining fights of our era.
You are right around globe poverty is not as bad as it was 25 years ago.In the same piece you shown they say national inequality is going up especially in America where work productivity has not match wages. This is the reason why Americans have so much debt because they have to take out loans just to stay above water. And to add upon this the GOp tax bill is going to make national inequality much worse. As the tax burden will shifted away from the rich to the middle class that is literally grasping for scraps. Poverty in America is increasing.
Perspective | Extreme poverty returns to America
[QUOTE]Forty million Americans live in poverty, nearly half in deep poverty — which U.N. investigators defined as people reporting income less than one-half of the poverty threshold. The United States has the highest child poverty rates — 25 percent — in the developed world. Then there are the extremely poor who live on less than $2 per day per person and don’t have access to basic human services such as sanitation, shelter, education and health care. These are people who cannot find work, who have used up their five-year lifetime limit on assistance, who do not qualify for any other programs or who may live in remote areas. They are disconnected from both the safety net and the job market.
In addition to the reduction of public assistance and social services, the rise in extreme poverty can also be attributed to growing inequality. To quote the U.N. report: “The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American Illusion, as the U.S. … now has the lowest rate of social mobility of any of the rich countries.” In 1981, the top 1 percent of adults earned on average 27 times more than the bottom 50 percent of adults. Today the top 1 percent earn 81 times more than the bottom 50 percent.
Declining wages at the lower end of the economic ladder make it harder for people to save for times of crisis or to get back on their feet. A full-time, year-round minimum wage worker, often employed in a dead-end job, falls below the poverty threshold for a family of three and often has to rely on food stamps.
The current tax bill promises to further exacerbate the problem by providing generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, modest tax cuts for many middle-class families and decreased spending on programs that help the poor, which currently constitute only 1.5 percent of federal outlays.
The growth of extreme poverty in the land of plenty is an indicator that we shouldn’t be talking about how to slash spending on social programs, but how to expand services and better meet the needs of the vulnerable among us. One and a half million American households live in extreme poverty today, nearly twice as many as 20 years ago. If this trend continues, we will undoubtedly see the number of extremely poor Americans rise dramatically, imperiling the values of democracy and human rights.[/QUOTE]
This is not an issue to blame the rich. It is just highlighting that income inequlity in the US is getting worse and will lead to major issues in future if it is not tackled seriously.
