Oxfam’s Love Affair With ‘Inequality’

Its zero-sum view obscures the ways in which life for the poor has improved in the past 20 years. 

By Johan Norberg and Gonzalo Schwarz. Excerpts:

"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. 

You wouldn’t learn it from Oxfam, but the global Gini coefficient measuring inequality has fallen from 92 to 88 since 2000. The top 1% saw their share of global income cut from 49% to 44.5%."

"the world’s poorest five billion have become significantly richer."

"the world’s poorest five billion have become significantly richer."

"Oxfam report: Global poverty is now at its lowest level ever recorded—8.6%, down from 29% in 2000."

"they look at wealth and poverty as a zero-sum story of inequality rather than the positive story of upward social mobility."