Escalating inequity is a ticking bomb - The concentration of wealth

YOU would not have to be an old-school Trotskyite, an unrepentant Maoist, a blazing Bolshevik or even one of the mild, low-octane socialists sheltered by the Irish Labour party to recognise, instantly and instinctively, that the figures published this weekend showing that the richest 62 people in the world own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population — some 3.6bn people — describe an unsustainable outrage and a ticking timebomb.

A report from Oxfam, a charity dedicated to fighting poverty and inequality, points out that the richest 1% — around 73m out of the world’s 7.3bn people — own as much as everyone else put together. The report was published ahead of the annual World Economic Forum of the great and the good of world politics and business in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

The figures are cold, chastening and unavoidable. The gap between rich and poor had widened “dramatically” in the last year. At the start of the decade the combined wealth of the 388 richest people matched that of the poorest half of the world, but that number fell to just 80 last year and stands at 62 today. The total wealth of the poorest half of the world fell by a trillion dollars since 2010, even though this group of people grew by 400m.