It’s that time of year again: Oxfam is making up data. Warning about ”widening and extreme inequality”, “Since 2020, the richest 5 men in the world have doubled their fortunes. During the same period, almost 5 billion people globally have become poorer.” The truth is different: For the world as a whole, these annual shifts have roughly cancelled out, leaving global wealth inequality back at the level prevailing when the pandemic began, which, for most inequality indicators, was the lowest level recorded this century.

What happened to the “race to the bottom”, the most popular anti-globalization theory around 2000? Stiglitz et al warned we’d see more poverty, child labor and pollution as countries lowered standards to attract global capital. Well, every prediction turned out to be false. 🧵 The share of workers in extreme poverty declined faster than ever before, from 26% to 6% between 2000 and 2022.

Why on earth did I write a Capitalist Manifesto? Because more people believe in ghosts than in capitalism. Today's fashionable narrative is that the rich got richer and the poor poorer, inequality surged, and during the pandemic, free trade failed us. But that’s all wrong. 🧵 Yes, we’ve had 20 bad years, with financial crises, the pandemic, war in Europe. And yet, it has also been the 20 best years in history, because free people adapt. 135,000 people were lifted out of extreme poverty EVERY DAY. Annual child mortality declined by 4 million lives.

How did Sweden fare during the pandemic? Back then, the world was shocked by our openness. New York Times called us a “cautionary tale”, Trump said “Sweden is suffering very greatly”. But we never heard how it all turned out.

Now I’ve looked: Sweden did better than others. 🧵 Sweden had no orders to stay at home and no mask mandates. Schools, offices, factories, restaurants, libraries, shopping centers, gyms and hairdressers stayed open. Our Social Democratic Prime Minister said that individual responsibility was preferable to government control.

A brief guide to the Swedish election today 🇸🇪 In the last polls, it’s 49.7% – 49.3% and anything can happen after an election campaign which has mostly focused on crime and electricity prices, and has neglected economics and visions. A 🧵 One reason that it’s close is that the Social Democratic government gained popularity after the pandemic and Ukraine war. It supported Ukraine and applied for Nato membership, and had a famously relaxed pandemic response (in Sweden only the far right wanted lockdowns). /2

Oxfam published a new report today, ahead of the Davos meeting, as usual blaming poverty and hunger on “neoliberalism”, inequality and billionaire wealth. Here is what’s wrong with it. 🧵
oxfam.org/en/research/pr… Interestingly, Oxfam wrote a similar report ahead of Davos 2012. They said we would see millions more in poverty in the 2010s unless we regulated markets and reduced inequality. Now they say we failed to reduce inequality. But you know what they forget to mention? /2

The four archetypal ways to face electoral defeat with dignity:

1) “The people have spoken, the bastards.”
– Dick Tuck after losing the 1966 California State Senate election. 2) Supporter: “Governor, every thinking person will be voting for you”.

Adlai Stevenson: “Madam, that is not enough. I need a majority.”

Four must-see charts in the debate about COVID-19 modelling. Sweden's Dagens Nyheter looked at influential predictions on patients in intensive care (and the outcome) in the country without lockdown. The highest curve is for present Swedish strategy: 1) Gardner et al, medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

Michael Ryan, World Health Organization, evaluating the Swedish model:

1) “I think there's a perception out there that Sweden has not put in place control measures and has just allowed the disease to spread. Nothing could be further from the truth.” 2) “Sweden has put in place a very strong public health policy around physical distancing… What it has done differently is that it has very much relied on its relationship with its citizenry and the ability and will to implement social distancing and self-regulate.”

Five facts about East and West Germany on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the wall: 1) Before the war, the East was richer. In 1989, East Germany’s per capita income was less than half of West Germany’s. 2) The wall did not just divide Germany. It also divided the car manufacturer Auto Union. In the West it developed Audi. In the East it came up with the Trabant.

Today Oxfam reminds us they see inequality as tragedy. So here's the annual reminder of what they consider success. No matter which measure of poverty you use, it has declined faster than ever in the last decades.