62 People own the same as half the world, reveals Oxfam Davos report (2016) | Hacker News Reader

62 People own the same as half the world, reveals Oxfam Davos report (2016)

oxfam.org

72 pointsotikik73 comments

Thanks for sharing. These data date back to 2016. In the following years, Oxfam updated the report where they found this inequality to be further exacerbated: "Just 8 men own same wealth as half the world" [0, 1].

[0] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/just-8-men-own-same-...

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-billionaires-...

These were the 8 men:

1. Bill Gates (Microsoft)

2. Amancio Ortega (Inditex)

3. Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway)

4. Carlos Slim (América Móvil, Grupo Carso)

5. Jeff Bezos (Amazon)

6. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

7. Larry Ellison (Oracle)

8. Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg LP)

Their wealth totaled $426 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World's_Billionaires#2016

This is all very interesting, thanks for sharing. While I am not familiar at all with such degree of wealth, the first thing I noticed while looking at this list is the absence of personalities from other regions of the globe, such as the MENA and Asia. I appreciate the histories and relevance of the people listed here, but I am reminded, at the same time, that the wealth of other key people is not fully understood and ascertained, due to a lack transparency – MBS and Putin come to my mind, among others. In a way this is the documented wealth, which is anyway key to understand the world we live in.

Transparency, all of these people get the majority of their wealth from ownership of public companies. So it is easy to estimate their overall wealth.

The report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of the current ‘62’, 53 are men and just nine are women.

I don't think that you can claim that the part before the hyphen follows from the part after the hyphen.

Equality: the fact of being equal in rights, status, advantages, etc.

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...

Men tend to occupy the extremes of society more than women. The good and the bad.

There's a theory that men are more extreme in many ways, so you'd expect them to be overrepresented at both the top and the bottom.

This mostly seems to get used to excuse obvious sexism, when it could be spun the other way, women may be the safe choice and we should expect some men to be poor and useless and there's nothing we can do to help them.

In this specific case, I think the commenter is technically correct, but also wrong on the big picture.

I don't understand you last sentence. How exactly am I wrong on the big picture in my original post?

You are correct that the logic of their argument is fallacious.

But they are also factually correct that women suffer more from the inequality, this may even be explored more fully in the report.

I never disputed that, though - as you say, I only pointed out that it does not follow from the observtion of the gender distribution of the 62.

> There's a theory that men are more extreme in many ways

Maybe a bit off-topic, but when i read on X-linked gen defects, i found they are not symmetric between the sexes. There are things like red-green blindness that almost exclusively affects men, while women are conductors (in their genes but its not affecting them). Haemophilia is another example. So there is a class of properties that predominantly show up in men, and this might also include properties that result in greater or lesser intelligence or abilities.

This is such an obvious explanation for the greater male variability hypothesis that i think i'm making some dumb mistake here. I'm not a biologist after all. Do we have someone here that can do a plausibility check on it?

The worlds top 62 richest are all outliers. Little can be drawn from them that represents the general population. As men are distributed more to the extremes you'd expect to see more men here. This excuses nothing and explains nothing.

Is it implying that 62 people having such wealth is a problem, but also there should be more equality amongst the people who shouldn't have the wealth in the first place?

Exactly. The logical conclusion of that statement is "equality is good, so the fact we have few women billionaires means women have greater equality, which is good".

So it sound like we should cheer that so few women are billionaires in the spirit of supporting equality?

Yeah, I think if those 62 people were all women nobody's life were improved (except for those women, I guess). That note is largely tangential to the claim.

The reason women are generally more affected by wealth inequality (i.e. why more women are poorer) is that women generally perform more unpaid labor (e.g. in traditional mixed gender couples, women typically perform a larger share of domestic duties and spend more time raising and nurturing children than men).

For a less obvious example: my grandfather was a homeopathic practitioner and when his wife wasn't doing chores or looking after their daughter she would help in the practice as an unpaid assistant. As she had never formally been an employee and thus never paid into the federal pension fund, she ended up on welfare when he died and left her without any savings. We had to teach her the basics of banking after his death because he had always insisted on managing the family finances and insurances. This may sound absurd and careless by modern standards but was culturally normal when they were young. In fact, married women only gained the right to seek employment without the permission of their husbands during her lifetime.

> women generally perform more unpaid labor

If a couple is married, it is not effectivly unpaid if the other part can work becouse of the unpaid labour.

The main problem I see is that the woman's carrier might suffer which would be a problem in the event of a divorce.

That's exactly where this "article" lost me as a reader.

I've been hearing/reading all these for a while; the attention went up a notch post 2008 financial crisis, more so after the bailouts.

As much as I'm disturbed by these numbers, I'm beginning to wonder if the attention is all just a waste. Like just see what happened during 2020 lockdowns? Rich got more richer (at least in India), and then in 2021 the searing inflation hit the middle and lower class the most; and now the fed is raising rates leading to job loss of, again middle/lower class. Also, the energy crisis in EU is hurting small/medium businesses the most.

I don't know; maybe it's better to focus on institutions and structures that lead to this inequality rather than directly attacking the rich by drawing attention to these inequality numbers. Instead of these numbers why don't we figure out what lead to that inequality in the first place? How do we prevent rich from converting their money to power through lobbying, and funding politicians? How do we help the lower income group through free education, and housing?

I for once really liked the recent student debt (partial) cancellation/reduction program in the US. Though I have absolutely no horse in this as I don't even live in the US; I'm glad that (ex) students' debt burden is being reduced.

That is the real means to change society, through its institutions, or creating new ones (unions, interest groups, etc) that can challenge the existing institutions.

Killing a rich man won't do much, especially if he has a will. The point of interest is the system that creates a strong power law distribution in the first place.

The energy crisis has also taken big chunks out of the wealth of super-rich people whose wealth is not in the energy industry. For example it looks like Bloomberg's Billionaires Index is estimating that Bezos (#2 wealthiest) lost 28% of his wealth since the start of the year, the chairman of Louis Vutton lost 30%, and Bill Gates (#5) and Warren Buffett (#6) lost 24% and 14% despite being well diversified. The thing is that on the way down all the headlines are about the cost to ordinary people and none mention the effects on the wealthy, whilst on the way up the headlines are about the gains for the wealthy and any benefits to ordinary people go almost unnoticed.

They don't have it in cash under the mattress though, or as yachts and mansions.

Let me preface by saying that I do not think that having such inequality is in any way good. But there is a widespread misunderstanding of what being rich means, their wealth is not calculated like normal people's wealth (bank account, house, car, job security...).

Most of the wealth of the richest people in the world is in the form of investments. This wealth is not liquid and is largely under the control of other individuals. It is used to help start, expand or rescue valuable companies and pay salaries. Often this money subsidies lots of consumer products that are sold at a loss and benefit the population (Uber and Twitter have almost never been profitable for instance, even if their value is debatable). Yes they do "own" it in the sense that they have the rights to future profits, and they can exchange these rights with other investors for cash to a limited degree. But in practice the vast majority of their wealth is in circulation benefiting many others, and they can't take it out of circulation without loosing most of it (so are they even that rich?).

And yes, most of this wealth is speculative too (potential of future profits), it's more like a probability of future wealth. They can take some loans against this speculative wealth to have cash at hand, but they do need to pay for the extra risk involved.

However, even if the cannot use most of their wealth to buy luxury, they do have significant power in the sense that they can choose who to help with their wealth. They are forced to help many other people (investment), but they do not tend to provide the help that society most needs (mostly because individual consumers don't tend to want what society at large most needs).

This statistic is a pet peeve of mine because it's so misleading.

1) Something like 30-40% of people in the world have a negative net worth. For example: if you graduate college with loans, your net worth is negative. That means anyone with a positive net worth has a higher net worth than 30-40% of the world combined. But that is a meaningless fact.

2) This doesn't take other factors into account, like local cost of living. For example, someone with $100k in one country might be relatively wealthier than someone with $1m in another country. But if the first country has 10 people with $100k and the second country had one person with $1m, the Davos Report claim would sound the same.

You would want liquidity as a measure too. Or like, dollars spent per year, or something.

What do these 62 people "own"? Probably stocks, luxurious real estate that's very expensive but probably doesn't occupy huge swathes of land, collectibles and some spare cash.

What's more disturbing is the decision-making power they possess, both through their companies and through their connections with policy makers. They can influence the media with their "investment plans" and grand visions, they can lobby for their undertakings against the general interest of the population, essentially undermining democracy.

Considering this is based off Forbes list, and Forbes has Peter Thiel's net worth at ~1\5th the amount that's confirmed to be in his backdoor IRA, I doubt the accuracy.

It is a huge flaw since it is notoriously opaque and leans towards public company shareholders.

Another easy example is that they completely miss the mind-boggingly wealthy like Queen Elizabeth II who was at the time the largest land owner on the planet and her wealth would lap everyone on that list. She was also a woman so they wouldn't get to complain about sexism in wealth distributions nearly as much.

The person writing this article is almost definitely part of the 1%. Who cares what gender the 62 richest people in the world are; these people cannot be the victims of inequality. What evidence is presented here that says "if rich people earnt less then poor people would earn more" which is the obvious inference. It is intuitive but is it true? If rich people pay more tax this doesn't get given to poor people as wages, so how does the tax question relate to the poverty issue? I agree that more tax revenue is good as it pays for better public services but there isn't any talk of 'wealth' provided by public services being part of the discussion.

More tax revenue could mean more/better public transport and less pot holes on roads, so a "poor" person doesn't have to buy/maintain a car or spend their time walking to/from work[1]. They can use the money not spent on a car on other things they need/want, spend the time more productively at work to earn more money, at home to learn some new skill, or heck, even spend time with their kids and help them grow up to be productive members of society.

But well, many think: OMG, spending tax money on public utilities!?! That's Unamerican! Spending time with kids? That's commie socialist talk!

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=man+walks+work+got+gifted+a+... - incredibly there are several different people here, and there are probably a lot more who aren't getting gifted cars.

> could

I think the GP was making a note about exactly this: it could, but will it?

What evidence is there that keeping equality at the same level for the uber-rich would have resulted in higher standard for the poor?

It could have translated to the second 49% still leaving the bottom 50% in the gutters.

In all likelihood, the result would have been quite similar to what has already happened: slightly larger gains for the poorest, but most of the gains would be in the middle and higher classes. Nothing to be sneezed at, but hardly a substantive change, yet with the risk that some of those investments in jobs would be gone too.

Are we talking about taxing the rich more, or about the gender equality of the top 62? I think the post I'm replying to is talking about taxes, and I'm talking about taxes as well.

> It could have translated to the second 49% still leaving the bottom 50% in the gutters.

What is "It" here? Gender equality of the top 62 people/1%?

I am talking of taxes too. We've got no proof where the tax money would go or that it would benefit the poorest if governments simply had more money. Basically, there's no commitment from any government that it would spend any surplus tax money on the poor (because it wouldn't be a surplus without alternate reality).

As my comment said, it doesn't have to be explicitly spent on the poor. https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/6/15/econo...

I still have no idea what you're trying to argue, and I feel your generalization about "there's no commitment" is a lazy argument, let me join you in your laziness because I won't bother trying to refute it.

Ad hominem attacks are no solution to misunderstandings between people.

The point is that we don't know that increasing taxes for the rich would change anything in the wealth distribution. A model is a model, not proof.

This was published in 2016. I wonder what it looks like right now, and in the years since 2016.

apparently 8 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33005679

Modern economies are capital intensive.

So you need a big pool of capital to make them work.

You can't get that from normal people, because they prefer to spend 110% of their incomes and live on EZ credit (so they are a capital sink, not a source).

You can't get it from governments because people keep voting for unfunded tax cuts and services (so another capital sink instead of source).

So the economy is desperate for what billionaires offer: capital.

So they get rewarded accordingly. And if you tax them or abolish them, the economy will suffer enormously.

People whine about "the 1%" (really the 0.00001%) but they are a natural consequence of the way we choose (individually and collectively) to live. Don't like this inequality? Spend less than your income, pay off you debts, consume less, produce more, invest, vote for higher taxes and less spending - eliminate the NEED for the super rich.

Just wait for the trickle down...

The average person is nevertheless still better off than they were in all of history.

Once basic needs are met (and tbh far exceeded in most first world countries), it seems that awareness about inequality only makes people less happy.

When talking about inequality, median is more appropriate than average.

And even if the median is higher, there's some psychology in whether that actually feels better in a chimp brain hierarchy.

And, the implicit argument that inequality is required or helps the progress in the average or median is usually implied but not supported.

If the average person has a good life then hooray that's great. Also irrelevant.

Let's move on to the bottom of the heap. The people starving to death for numerous reasons. The 62 people at the top are probably not responsible for the hundreds of millions of humans in poverty but they sit on top of a system that has been tuned over many centuries to make rich people richer.

I have no objections to billionaires but I want the rules changed so that earning a 100 million dollars is as hard for a billionaire as it is for a millionaire or just a person starting from scratch. I'm not quite sure what the rules would be but it'd be interesting to engineer that level playing field.

The economic power imbalance is still problematic.

Free trade and supply/demand were supposed to be a way to decentralize economic decisions, but they lead in practice to inequality and a situation where we have an economy that's planned by the wealthy for their own benefit (see planned obsolescence, predatory marketing practices, dark UI patterns, the privatization of justice through arbitration, lobbying, ...).

This point of view has always baffled me. It invites a kind of “shut up and be happy” mentality - like we should have all been happy subsisting on gruel in Victorian workhouses merely because we were “better off than in all of history”.

It’s silly to say that “basic needs are far exceeded” when we can clearly observe plenty of people in “most first world countries” struggle to meet basic needs.

This seems to be saying that these 62 people own so much, but the other view is that half the world owns so little. Both are true but to what degrees? What's missing here is how much does the other half that includes these 62 own? It's hard to get a picture of it when were only shown two numbers representing pie pieces--how big is the pie?

This seems unsustainable to say the least.

You own more than a quarter of the world using the same rhetoric. They include people with negative wealth in the bottom half, you don't have to go that low until the total sum of everyone there starts going negative.

In countries with the concept of welfare and bankruptcy, "negative wealth" is impossible. Even 0 wealth is impossible because there is a value to the welfare cashflow that the person is eligible for.

Right - a fresh out of med school graduate is worth negative a lot, due to debt, but has great earning potential over their lifetime.

I think this is a confounding factor in national analysis of income, but can't see it being much of a factor in global wealth terms.

Depends quite a lot of what the "own" means and what "half the world" means.

If we are talking about stocks, it might be meaningless, if real-estate, land and so on it is way too much.

Owning stock earns you money, which is very tangible. It is money taken from the labour of workers, and thus not going to them, and is the main way already rich non-working people can still buy whatever they want. It is far from meaningless.

While we're at this topic, does anybody know the Gini index of the world?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#World_income_...

Probably hard to aggregate given that the data isn't available for every country and not continuous: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?gt=

But trend in the US and Germany has been steady growth.

For those unaware: the Gini index ranges from 0 to 1 (or 0% to 100%) with 0 being total wealth equality and 1 being total inequality.

By which year can we bring it down to one?

Probably a higher chance of speeding up that process than doing anything else.

After which reboot should be easier.

Im pretty sure that during peak post-covid bull run, 1 or 2 men were richer than half the world. The most updated article is from 2017 and it was already at 8 people.

Klaus Schwab will own everything by 2030.

Does this mean that in just a few years, about 10 people would actually own most of the world?

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/just-8-men-own-same-... It was 8 people in 2017, a year after the posted article

Sadly, those statistics lose their punch over the years. They even have an opposite effect to what they intended to provoke.

Instead of outraging the centrists, and provoke a move to regulate extreme wealth, they infuriate the more liberals who respond with: "why not?". And the answer to "why not?" is necessarily idealogical, which means it cannot be debated.

(2016)

Then try this one https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-doub... from earlier this year.

The headline has only become more true, the number of people who now own the same as half the world is likely fewer and who those people are remain the same (Forbes billionaire list is the source for the research).

This is a startling fact:

> A one-off 99 percent tax on the ten richest men’s pandemic windfalls, for example, could pay:

to make enough vaccines for the world; to provide universal healthcare and social protection, fund climate adaptation and reduce gender-based violence in over 80 countries; All this, while still leaving these men $8 billion better off than they were before the pandemic.

It's not a fact. They don't have that money in cash. It's mostly based on shares in their companies.

If you take those shares, who's going to buy them, given you'll probably just take them again.

If you distribute them widely why would that happen? You could even give them to the people who actually work in the business and their suppliers and their suppliers suppliers etc. to make it "fair". Wouldn't want people's hard work to be stolen from them.

1) What's the point in giving them shares that no one will buy?

2) Did you read the parent comment? They were saying to take this "money" and pay for all vaccinations with it.

Yeah, they were talking about a windfall tax for coronavirus.

You were saying they couldn't do that because of shares.

I was saying the shares could be redistributed directly.

You seem to have decided that the shares can't be sold or transferred (and then sold) but I'm not sure why you made that leap.

As I understand it, it's not a windfall tax. That $8bn is not cash. It's the ownership of their businesses. My point is the government steals 95% of the business, and then what? Who would buy those shares to turn them into cash to spend on vaccinations (or whatever else)? Why would anyone buy shares that the government can take from them?

In your example of taking shares and giving them to other people, why would anyone buy them from the people they were given to? Why buy what the government will just take and give you?

Because a windfall tax is a sensible and boring idea that has been applied in even right-wing capitalist societies with success and general approval, not a slippery slope into totalitarian communism?

It doesn't matter if the windfall is a stack of cash, or an appreciating asset. It's the fact that you got richer without doing anything to earn it that makes it a windfall.

> Because a windfall tax is a sensible and boring idea that has been applied in even right-wing capitalist societies with success and general approval, not a slippery slope into totalitarian communism?

This isn't relevant. Only how it works is.

> It doesn't matter if the windfall is a stack of cash, or an appreciating asset

Can you elaborate on how a windfall tax on an asset works? An example might help.

I wasn't suggesting it had changed, just that I got a couple of paragraphs in and got confused when they said the prediction had come true a year early in 2015, and it's generally a trend to mark older stories with the year as the assumption is they are newly published.

The sneaky, dishonest trick that articles like that one use is that although share prices - and with them the wealth of the worlds' richest - dropped massively when the pandemic hit, this mostly happened before it was officially declared a pandemic and before everyone started taking a hit to their income from it. In general the stock market is a leading indicator that reflects what the actual economy that makes stuff and pays people's wages is expected to be like over the next few years. So articles like this are measuring from the bottom of the pandemic dip and pretending that it's new wealth that the richest have gotten, and also taking advantage of that time delay to make it seem like they're benefiting from the rest of us getting poorer when in reality it caused a massive drop in their wealth.

this is why taxation is theft

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