10 people now own everything
When the TV series The Office first came out, I was working in a dysfunctional office, and I found watching it extremely cathartic. I have many favorite lines from the show but one of my very favorites is from when the boss announces he has “bad news and good news”, then explains that, although most of his underlings are going to be sacked, he personally has been promoted.
- “That’s not good news, David, that’s only bad news and irrelevant news,” a colleague replied.
Anyway, that scene popped into my head when reading the latest Oxfam inequality report, with its revelation that, over the course of the pandemic, 99% of humanity has got poorer, but (here’s the good news!) the world’s ten richest men had more than doubled their wealth, at an average gain of $15,000 a second for the last two years.
- “If these ten men were to lose 99.999% of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99% of all the people on this planet,” said Oxfam International’s Executive Director Gabriela Bucher. “They now have six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people.”
It was not that long ago – only in the 1960s – that 3.1 billion was the entire human population of the earth. And now just 10 men, which is not enough people to make up a soccer team, own more wealth than them. What a time to be alive. Bad news and good news indeed.
While the world’s biggest oligarchs have been competing over which celebrities they can fly into space, the effects of inequality were killing 21,000 people a day. And the details of the report are, in some ways, worse than the headline. The pandemic has hit women harder than men, ethnic minorities harder than white people, and developing nations harder than rich ones. Humanity’s failure to respond to this crisis in an equitable manner is a worrying dress rehearsal for the far larger crisis that will be climate change.