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1. Emotional Blackmail Using Ignorance of Statistics
'26 richest are as wealthy as bottom half of the world population combined.' What a dastardly inequality, isn't it? Diabolically unfair? Actually, no. Not based on this statistic alone. Will need to see much more.
'26 richest are as wealthy as bottom half of the world population combined.' What a dastardly inequality, isn't it? Diabolically unfair? Actually, no. Not based on this statistic alone. Will need to see much more.
2. The number of richest people whose combined wealth is equal to the poorest half of all humanity varies from year to year obviously, but contrary to what you might imagine, this number has probably never ever in history been much greater than 50.
3. So is it really shocking that a statistic which always hovers in the range say 10 to 50, happens to be 26 this year. Will the world be much different if the number was 20 or 40. I think not.
4. Also, considering the fuzziness of such measurements, there is no way to know this number accurately anyway, but 26 is probably as good as 20 or 30. It's probably somewhere in that range.
5. Here is the fascinating thing which will blow the cover off this emotional blackmail scheme. A child with a nickel in his pocket is wealthier than 40% of all the poor in the world combined. Now that I took the ultra-rich out of the equation, there is nothing left, is there?
6. By now, if you haven't figured it out already, here's the reason why. Roughly speaking, the bottom third of the poorest households in the world have negative net worth, because of debt (mortgages, student loans, other borrowings, etc.).
7. The bottom half of the world's population (that 3.8 billion number) has a combined net worth of close to zero, because their net assets are pretty close to their net debt.
8. So you don't need to assemble the world's richest 26 together to show that their combined wealth is same as that of the bottom half of the whole world. Each and every one of them and probably thousands others individually have wealth that exceeds say 49% of the global poorest.
9. It's statistical prestidigitation (aka sleight-of-hand). Doesn't mean a thing. Be amused, not enraged. There may be other reasons to be enraged, but this statistic is not it.
10. To be clear, I am not denying income or wealth inequality, just saying this statistic doesn't capture it. I can imagine a far more equitable world, as well as a far worse one, which will still have this statistic very much the same. It's that useless a statistic.
The End
The End
