Oxfam are at it again: The 62 richest people own more than the bottom half of all people. The last time this was measured it was 80, and before that 388. All this means the world is getting worse. Something Must Be Done. And so on.
Some thoughts in response, and I am glad to see that many Guardian commenters have had similar thoughts:
This is a really bad way to measure things. To be in the top 1% you just have to own a normal house in London. What do the top 62 have that the others do not? A bigger house in London and a functionally equivalent but shinier car. They are certainly not eating all the food and making everyone else hungry.
There is not a fixed quantity of wealth. The rich people being rich takes nothing away from the poor people. They control resources, in the sense that they get to have a bigger influence over what gets made, but for the most part they got rich by making useful things, so they are probably the right people to be making such decisions. Their idiot children who inherit the money will soon fritter it away on fancy cars and restaurant food, so it will get redistributed to factory workers and waiters in the end anyway.
By any real measure, such as infant mortality, nutrition, life-expectancy, number of people subsistence farming, access to clean water: things are getting better. There is a web site showing all this but I can not find it.
And what would Oxfam do about it, anyway? Force the rich people to give it to governments, probably. See my previous comment about who has proven themselves able to make useful things.
Yes, Rob. Very well said.
“There is not a fixed quantity of wealth. The rich people being rich takes nothing away from the poor people.”
Whining about billionaires causing poverty is like a bit like saying that some people don’t talk much because the loudmouths have taken all the words.
“By any real measure, such as infant mortality, nutrition, life-expectancy, number of people subsistence farming, access to clean water: things are getting better.”
The maddening part is that Oxfam actually say this in their new adverts. They just refuse to credit free markets and competitive business, since that goes against the Narrative; no, they imply that it has something to do with their shiny bookshops and well-paid permanent staff. Or something like that.
I mean, let’s call a spade a spade. Oxfam is a major multinational corporation, by any reasonable definition of the word. It’s a group of people working together in multiple countries with a corporate identity and legal personality. It has impressively fitted-out shops on every high street in Britain, and advertises on TV. The difference is that it enjoys tax breaks, government subsidies, and lobbies to have the system in which its competitors operate constrained or dismantled. I don’t doubt that it does still do some charitable work, and that there are people working for it with the best of intentions. But they’ve created a monster. Oxfam has long since left behind St. Paul’s definition in his first letter to the Corinthians:
“Envieth not”? “Vaunteth not itself”? “Is not puffed up”, “thinketh no evil”? Nope, that doesn’t really sound much like any of these Big Charities, does it?
I mean, let’s call a spade a spade. Oxfam is a major multinational corporation, by any reasonable definition of the word. It’s a group of people working together in multiple countries with a corporate identity and legal personality. It has impressively fitted-out shops on every high street in Britain, and advertises on TV.
And executives who enjoy six figure salaries and enviable expense accounts.
I heard somewhere about a picture of the cars in Oxfam’s head office car park, and the impression I got was that the cheaper ones were Audis. I have not seen any such picture but it would be nice to see it.
I have also seen a meme about the head of Save the Children on social media with her picture captioned ‘Before you “save the children”, … I want my £234,000 a year salary‘, so it seems that a message is getting out there.
I love this from the Institute of Economic Affairs, in wonderfully controlled piece of contempt aimed at Oxfam:
“The methodology of adding up assets and subtracting debts and then making a global ‘net wealth’ distribution implies that many of the poorest in the world are those in advanced countries with high debts. Whilst we might have sympathy for the Harvard law graduate’s plight, it is unclear that worrying about her should be the focus of a development organisation.”
Let’s cut to the chase: Oxfarm, along with War on Want, Christian Aid and many others, is a leftist organisation, promoting anti-capitalist nonsense while under the protection of its charity status. It is, as Chris Mounsey first dubbed it, a fake charity and should be treated as such.
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXtgrb8WEAAZHAS.jpg
Alisa,
That’s the one. Thank you. The expression is perfect.
“Whining about billionaires causing poverty is like a bit like saying that some people don’t talk much because the loudmouths have taken all the words.”
That is such a great line that I will probably
stealborrow it.But to add a little leavening to this discussion, I would point out that to a significant extent the vast increase in the wealth of the top 1% is largely attributable to government policy of “quantitative easing”, i.e., injecting significant amounts of freshly-printed (so to speak) fiat currency into the banking system. The principal effect of this has been to artificially inflate the nominal values of financial assets (which, almost exclusively, are owned by that same 1%). To a very real extent their wealth is increasing while everyone else is being left behind; the much-vaunted “recovery” has not reached the middle class. In my opinion this can only be deliberate government policy; not everyone in government is as economically illiterate as Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders. So to a certain extent I agree with the concern expressed by Oxfam* and their fellow travelers on this matter, although obviously not with either their claims as to the cause of the growing “wealth disparity” or with their proffered remedies. In a sense the rich are getting richer at the expense of the rest of us, although indirectly so through the debasement of our currency.
For the same reason I can’t get too upset over the recent decline in global stock markets, and in fact must admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude over the squeals of the beneficiaries of essentially free government money watching their illegitimate “carry trade” profits evaporate.
* Please don’t take this as any sort of endorsement of Oxfam; I despise that organization.
Even if it was true, which it is NOT, that 62 people has as much money as three billion people – what policy caused this situation?
“Capitalism” – say the socialist cretins of Oxfam.
But capitalism is based upon REAL SAVINGS (the sacrifice of consumption) – not Credit Money expansion by Central Banks. The actual cause of artificial inequality.
“But we can reduce inequality by high tax rates”.
Yes that has worked soooooo well in New York and California.
And the funny thing is, the managers at Oxfam would probably be in the top 5% of earners globally.
Down with the Aristos etc…
I wonder what countries those people are in, and how much is related to government imposed regulation and/or scarcity?
It may well be true that the top 62 people together have as much wealth (net worth?) as the bottom 3.5 billion. It’s likely that the guy that has no debt and only two pennies to rub together has more net worth than the bottom 2.5-3 billion together (i.e. those with negative net worth).
A long time ago I resolved that when I felt like fantasizing about being rich, I would imagine having wealth equal to the U.S. national debt. Now Oxfam has given me an alternate, and probably higher target: I will imagine having as much wealth as the poorer 50% of humanity. That should make for some amusing fantasies.
I seem to recall that if you had $10 and no debt then you were richer than 50% of Americans (due to mortgage, student loan and credit card debt), so I suppose all of these things are relative.
Much higher than 5 percent. I’m in the top 5 percent of one of the wealthier nations on earth, and I don’t make close to what an Oxfam manager makes. A quarter of a millions pounds a year is easily one percent territory.
I do think there is something weird going on with the increasing concentration of wealth. I would like to see that list of 62: I would bet a fair amount that many of the people on it gained their wealth through cronyism and state intervention.
Any Russian oligarch, for instance; also Saudi princes, Venezuelan “bolibourgeois”. Carlos Slim of Mexico rivals Gates and Buffett; he made his pile as the operator of Mexico’s cell phone monopoly. I see lots of other sweetheart dealings.
I see another factor: for the last decade or so, central banks have been lending money to commercial and investment banks at very low interest which they then lend out at moderate interest, generating huge profits. The proportion of corporate income collected by financial-industry companies has climbed dramatically since 1980 or so.
Rich, here is a list of the top 500, though I don’t know if Oxfam are using the same measure: http://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2015/03/02/forbes-billionaires-full-list-of-the-500-richest-people-in-the-world-2015/#2715e4857a0b153abda116e3
Bill Gates is #1 with a net worth of 77Bn. If you multiply that by 62 you only get 4000 Bn. Something doesn’t add up. How is wealth controlled by states measured?
In addition to all the other reasons this is idiocy on stilts, as of 2015 (data here), 33.7% of the world population is under 19, who, unsurprisingly, have approximately zero net worth. Combine this with “has a significant physical or mental disability, including about 5 percent of children, according to a new report prepared jointly by the World Health Organization and the World Bank” (link) – the two populations overlap, but you will account for well over 40% of 50% Oxfam whines about. These are people with zero, squat, nada in wealth – what are we to do about it? Ban childhood and severe disability? Give kids stock portfolios?
However, you have to see where Oxfam is coming from “Everyone who has positive net worth owns more than the bottom 40% of people in the world combined” just does not have the same zing to it.
The debt bubble is a serious matter – most people do have little real wealth (indeed they are in debt).
But Oxfam, and the policies they support, are not part of the solution – they are part of the problem.
“Born in a spirit of proud quaker radicalism, Oxfam had arrived.” [sic]
Sounds like a close relative of the American Friends Service Committee.
http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/remember-when-oxfam-took-on-winston-churchill-apartheid-the-labour-government-big-pharma-and-the-pesticides-industry/
For those who fancy the experience of “horrid fascination,” here is Discover the Networks’ article on AFCS:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6172
For the condensed skinny on Oxfam International, go to Discoverthenetworks.org, click “Groups,” click “individual groups, scroll down fairly far.
At the end of piece, DTN says it is “adapted from” NGO Monitor. For more really horrid fascination, see Oxfam article at
http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/oxfam
Even discussing or measuring “inequality” is to surrender to communism.
My main surprise is that there are even 62 people who are worth something in the world. That there are 4-6 billion who are useless is no surprise at all.
Once, on a logistics course, I sat through a presentation by an Oxfam type as part of a module on humanitarian logistics. In the bar later one of the university lecturers who delivered most of the course pointed something out to me; the very first Oxfam slide focussed not on their mission, or their results, but on their turnover…
Smited.
I think that aside from simple envy (which I happen to think is not as common as some may think), one of the main other reasons many ordinary people are resentful of the few very rich ones is that they think of money as power, political power in particular. Although this take on things is intuitive with most who subscribe to it, and and as such is overly simplistic, it is not without basis in reality. Money can and often does mean power, and power in its negative sense is synonymous with ‘political power’.
All of which is to say, I guess, that this is a distinction worth making publicly, in order to shift the focus from mere wealth to power, political power specifically, and only discuss wealth to the extent it may or may not be used as the means towards power.
“How is wealth controlled by states measured?”
Would it be a stretch to venture that possibly it isn’t?
Because Plamus reminds me of the oft-repeated mantra that “more than half of the privately-held land in Scotland is owned by [I can’t remember the exact number of] people”. Note the “privately-held” bit. The government, mostly in the form of the Forestry Commission, owns about 70% (again, I can’t recall the exact figure off the top of my head) of all the land in Scotland.
“More than… ooh, about 15% of the land or thereabouts, give or take, in Scotland is owned by a dozen or so people” doesn’t have quite the same zing either.
Having stuff is not what’s important to most people. Having more stuff than others have is what’s important to most people. That’s one reason why the fact that 62 people possess as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity matters.
“Having stuff is not what’s important to most people. Having more stuff than others have is what’s important to most people”
I reject this, and all the other relative poverty nonsense. That absolute wealth is most important seems so staggeringly obvious that I can’t bring myself to believe research claiming to show people think otherwise. There *must* be some foul play involved in the spread of this idea.