Just 8 Men Own Same Wealth as Half the World

Not that I would necessarily agree that the world is becoming a fairer place, I think that the stats that Oxfam use here are designed to be inflammatory rather than insightful.

Read this for some more analysis: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/01/oxfam-wont-tell-capital...

I know what will fix this: more tax cuts for the wealthy!

Without necessarily commenting on the overall conclusions, I have a hard time feeling like I'm being well informed when certain stats seem like they're trying to cover something up (and if they're not, then maybe just show the transparent stats instead of trying to pretty them up):

> Between 1988 and 2011 the incomes of the poorest 10 percent increased by just $65 per person, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent grew by $11,800 per person – 182 times as much.

Can someone explain the relevance of comparing the bottom 10% with the top 1% instead of the top and bottom 1% or the top and bottom 10%? It makes sense to me, purely from a statistical likelihood that the growth would be a lot higher for the top 1% than from the top 10% due to the smaller selected sample size.

> Contrary to popular belief, many of the super-rich are not ‘self-made’. Oxfam analysis shows over half the world’s billionaires either inherited their wealth or accumulated it through industries which are prone to corruption and cronyism.

It's hard to tell what the actual break-down is of the world's billionaires when they lump together those who inherited their wealth and those who accumulated it through industries prone to corruption and cronyism. It seems like it'd be easier to prove the point that someone is not self-made if they inherited their wealth (versus trying to convince someone that a given industry is so prone to corruption and cronyism that the billionaire can't be considered to be "self-made").

But for all I know, only 1% of them inherited their wealth and the other >49% accumulated it through corrupt industries. I'm sure that's not the case, but you can't tell that from their article, since it lumps them in together for an aggregate statistic. And it feels like they're trying to gloss over the detail of how corrupt an industry may be, by lumping it in with the inherited wealth and thus lending some of the credibility of the argument of inherited wealth not being self-made to the argument of wealth accumulation in corrupt industries not being self-made.

I'm not really saying anything about the conclusion itself, but regardless of the argument, it's difficult to share articles with others when they contain misleading or at least flawed statistics like this.

This is only true if humans don't own themselves or if they have no value.

How much of that $425bn is liquid, I wonder?