https://wsj.com/articles/oxfams-inequality-report-obscures-how-l…
Oxfam’s work has other flaws. By focusing only on the five richest men, it ignores the 24 billionaires who fell off Forbes’s famous list after losing a combined $43 billion between 2022 and 2023. In addition, the report fails to mention that the total number of dollar millionaires fell by 3.5 million last year, without even taking inflation into account. Absurdly, as Max Ghenis of PolicyEngine has pointed out, Oxfam calculates the rise in wealth of the five superrich from March 18, 2020, the low point of the Covid crash, while the group measures the decline for the five billion poor from 2019, before the downturn.
You wouldn’t learn it from Oxfam, but the global Gini coefficient measuring inequality has fallen from 92 to 88 since 2000. The top 1% saw their share of global income cut from 49% to 44.5%.
More important, the world’s poorest five billion have become significantly richer. The Oxfam report makes it seem as if things have gotten much worse for the poor since the pandemic. Oxfam makes this claim five times in its report, but never says by how much. It turns out that the poor’s share of global wealth—as measured by assets minus debts—declined by 0.2%, a figure so small that it is within the margin of error.
Something else you won’t find in the Oxfam report: Global poverty is now at its lowest level ever recorded—8.6%, down from 29% in 2000.
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