Oxfam, which describes itself as “a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice,” released its annual inequality report this month. The group warns of “widening and extreme inequality,” noting that the world’s five richest men have doubled their wealth since 2020 while “during the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer.” As is often the case with Oxfam, the report is misleading.
According to Oxfam’s main source, the UBS/Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, annual shifts in inequality have roughly canceled out, returning global wealth inequality to the same level as when the pandemic began. Most inequality indicators are at their lowest levels in a century.
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.
Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal.
Johan Norberg is an author, lecturer, and documentary filmmaker. He is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the European Centre for International Political Economy. Follow his work @johanknorberg.
Economics of Flourishing
Oxfam, which describes itself as “a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice,” released its annual inequality report this month. The group warns of “widening and extreme inequality,” noting that the world’s five richest men have doubled their wealth since 2020 while “during the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer.” As is often the case with Oxfam, the report is misleading.
According to Oxfam’s main source, the UBS/Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, annual shifts in inequality have roughly canceled out, returning global wealth inequality to the same level as when the pandemic began. Most inequality indicators are at their lowest levels in a century.
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.
Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal.
Johan Norberg
Johan Norberg is an author, lecturer, and documentary filmmaker. He is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the European Centre for International Political Economy. Follow his work @johanknorberg.
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