Happy Davos Week! Isn’t is great to be rich? As the business elites of the universe gather in Switzerland to discuss the populist backlash sweeping across the Western world, and to ponder whether or not Donald Trump is all their fault, a new Oxfam report reveals that the eight richest people in the world now have about as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the global population. If that sounds outrageous to you—Oxfam’s Mark Goldring, for one, says “It is beyond grotesque that a group of men who could easily fit in a single golf buggy own more than the poorest half of humanity”—remember that it could be worse: the octet could be as rich as the top fifty percent of the the world.
In Davos this week, heads of state, bank C.E.O.s, private equity chiefs, and hedge fund managers will hold a bunch of panels to grapple with the possibility that the policies they’ve advocated over the years—globalization, automation, deregulation—may have exacerbated the inequality crisis that spawned, among other things, Brexit and the unexpected political ascent of Donald Trump. And according to Oxfam, things are only going to get worse from here: Over the next twenty years, ”500 people will hand over $2.1 [trillion] to their heirs—a sum larger than the annual GDP of India, a country with 1.3 billion people.”
Of course, not everyone is disturbed by the report, or at least for the reasons you’d expect them to be. Mark Littlewood, the general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, told the Guardian that income inequality is nothing more than a gentle rising tide, lifting all the world’s many-sized boats. “Once again Oxfam have come out with a report that demonizes capitalism,” Littlewood said, “conveniently skimming over the fact that free markets have helped over 100 million people rise out of poverty in the last year alone.”