The eight richest persons in the world hold as much wealth as the poorer half of the global population, an analysis of charity group Oxfam has revealed.
Six of the eight super-rich on the Forbes list are American entrepreneurs, namely Bill Gates, Microsoft cofounder; Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway CEO and chair; Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and founder; Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO and founder; Larry Ellison, Oracle cofounder; and Michael Bloomberg, former New York mayor.
Mexican tycoon and Grupo Carso owner Carlos Slim and Spanish retail magnate and Zara founder Amancio Ortega round out the list, where all eight’s net wealth amount to a staggering $426 billion. This wealth is shared by over 3.6 billion people, the bottom half of the world’s population.
Report Findings
Tracking inequality in wealth since 2016 and revealing its findings during the start of the World Economic Forum in Swiss ski resort Davos, Oxfam said that the gap has become “far greater than feared.”
“Left unchecked, growing inequality threatens to pull our societies apart,” Oxfam said in the report, citing cases such as Brexit, the United Kingdom’s vote to pull out of the European Union, and the Trump campaign in the U.S. for a “worrying rise in racism” as well as a source of “widespread disillusionment with mainstream politics.”
The global think tank noted that last year, the wealthiest 1 percent held a bit more than half the riches of the entire Earth, while the Forbes list’s of 1,810 billionaires maintain $6.5 trillion in riches, amounting to about 70 percent of humanity’s total.
Oxfam produced the report using wealth statistics from Credit Suisse, where 80 percent of the lower half of the global population are those mostly living in Africa and India: younger, likely to be single, and probably poorly educated.
A tiny fraction of this bottom half is found in the United States, where the formula included those young adults who retain a huge mortgage, including maybe a student loan that makes them look poor on paper.
Ignoring debt would take 56 of the richest persons to be equivalent to the wealth of the bottom half, Oxfam clarified. Last year, for instance, it took 62 super-rich individuals to equal the same bottom half, with the change credited to improvements in data quality.
Also playing a part in the widening gap was the stock market, which funneled even more wealth to investors, as well as the dollar’s increasing value. In 2017, for example, the market will mostly likely see a surge in tech IPO.
Not The Full Picture?
Institute of Economic Affair’s Mark Littlewood said that Oxfam should instead focus on boosting growth than reporting the said gap, pointing to the group being “strangely preoccupied" with the wealthy.
Ben Southwood, Adam Smith Institute’s research head, also dubbed the wealth data’s interpretation misleading, saying that the poor’s welfare is what matters instead of the wealth of the rich.
While saying that zeroing in on blatant wealth does not constantly “give the full picture," UK economist Gerard Lyons applauded Oxfam for singling out entities believed to fuel inequality with their business models that were practically focused on getting more lucrative returns for already-rich owners and their top executives.
Oxfam called for a “more human economy” as well as a crackdown on executive wages and tax evasion and higher taxes for the rich.
It is worth noting, however, that some of these top billionaires have already given away billions of dollars for charity.
Bill Gates and wife Melinda Gates set up their $44-billion foundation back in 2000, while Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan in 2015 pledged giving away 99 percent of their net worth in their lifetime, equivalent to around $45 billion based on Facebook share value during that time.
