Oxfam’s Disinformation Agenda
By Pieter Cleppe , European Conservative.
Oxfam complains about growing inequality. There is just one problem: the figures don’t add up.
In what has become a tradition, Oxfam issued a report at the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos, complaining about “growing and extreme inequality.” The report states that “The world’s five richest men have seen their fortunes more than double since 2020, while in the same period five billion people have become poorer.”
There is just one problem: those figures don’t add up. Swedish researcher Johan Norberg has explained that the UBS “Global Wealth Report,” which is “the main source for Oxfam’s wealth calculations,” reveals that, “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.” Norberg adds that, “For most inequality indicators, [this] was the lowest level recorded this century.”
Looking only at the five people who did the best in a given period will always give the impression Oxfam wants to create. In doing so, the NGO—which has an obsession with the so-called Gini index, an inequality comparison method invented by an Italian fascist—ignores the 24 rich people who disappeared from the Forbes list after losing $43 billion in one year.
Norberg adds that the Gini coefficient has fallen since 2000, from 92 to 88, with the share in global wealth of the 1% richest also dropping from 49 to 44.5%. Daniel Waldenström, co-author of the Global Wealth Report, observes that, “Global wealth inequality has declined by all standard measurements.” Since 1900, the share of the wealthiest 1% in global wealth has fallen in all European countries, from 50-70% then, to 20-23% in 2017. Only in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Britain, can one observe a trend towards a new concentration of wealth; but even then, it is still to a much lesser extent than in the years 1900-1950.
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