Wealth of richest 1% 'equal to other 99%'

bbc.com

15 points·carsie··5 comments

According to their chart, the poorest 50% have lost about 1/3 of their total wealth since a peak in 2010, while during the same time period the richest 62 people have almost doubled in wealth. http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/FA06/production/_...

I wonder how the wealth of the poorest 50% is estimated, and what the causes are of the change. Seems like a very sharp decline.

Would also be great to see a few more demographic buckets on this chart, and to see the time frame extended back 30 years earlier.

The methodology is pretty bad: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding.... It implies, for example, that China has zero people who are extremely poor (bottom decile), while more of the very poor live in the United States than anywhere else but India. This is just Facebook fodder.

> "Instead of an economy that works for the prosperity of all, for future generations, and for the planet, we have instead created an economy for the 1%," Oxfam's report says.

It's hard to take this seriously when global living standards have done nothing but gone up over the last 30 years.

A recent graduate from an Ivy League university in the US with thousands of dollars in debt and an job offer in Wall Street is accounted as poorer than a farmer in Congo by Oxfam.

This shows how stupid it is to measure wealth without taking human capital into account.

Human capital is an important aspect to take into account, but not all college graduates are coming from an Ivy league school and going directly into a job on Wall Street. I think they are trying to draw more attention to the inequality aspect of it, comparing our current situation to more prosperous times for everyone.

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