“Billionaires, for many of them, times have never been better.”
That’s a quote from Rebecca Riddell, the policy lead for economic and racial justice at Oxfam America.
“If you’d put their money in a room in 2020, and then you came back at the end of 2023, you would have found that the wealth has grown enormously,” says Riddell. “Three times the rate of inflation.”
The success of billionaires is one of the key points in a new report from global charity Oxfam International titled “Inequality Inc.” It’s an annual publication issued to coincide with the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which begins on Monday, Jan. 15. Each year since 1971, government and business leaders have come to the Swiss mountain resort town to mull over the world’s problems and possibilities.
As you might expect, the Oxfam findings have their skeptics.
Oxfam’s assertions
This latest edition of the Oxfam report (PDF) looks back over the last few years since 2020 and describes the growing unequal distribution of wealth as “the beginnings of a decade of division.”
Oxfam spells out just how well billionaires are faring: “The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 — at a rate of $14 million per hour — while nearly five billion people have been made poorer.”
(In case you’re wondering, the top five are Bernard Arnault and his family, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk.)
“You might think there would be little that could surprise us,” says Oxfam’s Riddell. Indeed, their report in 2022 made a very similar point. As NPR’s headline observed: “Oxfam says the rich got richer in the pandemic, and the wealth gap is killing the poor.”
But there’s something different this time around, says Riddell. “The astronomical nature of gains at the very top since 2020 — during a time when so many suffered — really stood out.”
Meanwhile, the report notes that for many “ordinary people” around the world, this decade has so far been tough going.
“It opened with a pandemic that devastated lives and economies,” says Riddell. “Add to that the challenges of a really prolonged cost-of-living crisis, climate breakdown and war. Progress against poverty has nearly stalled.”
According to Oxfam’s report, since 2020, almost five billion people have lost economic ground — that is, they’ve grown poorer.