The World Economic Forum is currently taking place again in Davos, Switzerland. picture alliance / Photoshot | –
Oxfam predicts the world will soon see its first trillionaire.
The world‘s five richest men have collectively doubled their wealth since 2020, according to Oxfam’s annual inequality report.
However, most people became poorer during this period, the report says.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by an editor.
The world could produce its first trillionaire within a decade while the majority of us become poorer, according to a new report. This comes from the Oxfam’s annual report on inequality which was published on Monday on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland). The predicted trillionaire would mean unprecedented levels of global inequality, which are already more stark than ever, the report said.
Since 2020, the world‘s five richest men have doubled their combined wealth, while five billion people, or about 60 percent of the world‘s population, have become poorer, the report said. The wealth growth of these five – Bernard Arnault and his family, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk – can now be measured in millions of dollars an hour, according to Oxfam.
Since 2020, their combined wealth has increased from “US$405 billion to $869 billion (from around €372 to around €800 billion) – with an increase of $14 million (around €13 million) per hour,” write the researchers in a summary.
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The current developments even surprise Oxfam
Oxfam regularly makes headlines with its annual report on wealth inequality, which has included some startling assessments in recent years. “You would think there would be little that would surprise us,” agreed Rachel Riddell, a policy director at the organization „NPR“. But this time it was different, she said. “The astronomical gains at the top since 2020 – at a time when so many have suffered – are truly striking.”
In the 2020s, “the ultra-ultra-rich are leaving everyone else far behind,” she said. Jeff Bezos’s fortune, for example, has increased by $32.7 billion (around €30 billion) to $167.4 billion (around €157 billion) since 2020, writes Oxfam.
In 2022, the organization made headlines by stating that a billionaire had joined every 30 hours during the pandemic.
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Why is inequality increasing?
Three major factors have given the majority of the world‘s population a difficult start to this decade: major conflicts, climate breakdown and the Covid-19 pandemic, the latest report says.
These factors have been exacerbated by corporate tax evasion, stagnating real wages, the erosion of workers’ rights, rampant privatization and corporate climate change denial, the report continued.
“An enormous concentration of global corporate and monopoly power is exacerbating inequality in the economy,” Oxfam said. Oxfam called for strengthening the state and regulating the power of corporations to get to the root of the problems.
The report’s calculations are based on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list and the Global Wealth Report 2023 der UBS.
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Criticism of the exact calculation, but not the conclusion of the report
However, the method for calculating the fate of the poorest five billion people has its critics. Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, told “NPR” that using wealth as a measure to determine this number may be misleading.
Measuring wealth, which subtracts people’s debts from their possessions, does not necessarily reflect poverty in all real-world situations, as it could easily happen that someone in a richer country takes on debt to study or take out a mortgage , he said.
However, no one questions that global poverty is a major problem – according to the World Bank 700 million people currently live in extreme poverty, around half of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
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