The richest 100 people in the world
are earning much more than enough to end the world's worst poverty.
Apologists
for inequality have a standard retort to anyone who calls for a more equal
distribution of the world’s treasure. If you took all the wealth of the wealthy
and divvied it up equally among all the poor, they claim, no one would gain
enough to accomplish much of anything.
Oxfam
International, one of the world’s premiere anti-poverty charitable
organizations, begs to differ. The world’s top 100 billionaires now hold so
much wealth, says a new Oxfam
report, that just the increase in
their net worth last year would be “enough to make extreme poverty history four
times over.”
“Oxfam’s
mission is to work with others to end poverty,” notes Oxfam analyst Emma Seery.
“But in a world with limited resources, this is no longer possible without an
end to extreme wealth.”
Oxfam timed its new analysis, The Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt Us All, to appear right on the eve of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This annual and earnest “issues” confab brings together a glittering array of global business and political leaders.
In
today’s recession-ravaged world, these leaders are playing defense. They feel
increasingly pressured to address the global economic inequality they’ve so
long tried to sweep under the rug.
That
pressure at this year’s Davos forum came from figures like
Christine Lagarde,
the former French finance minister who now directs the International Monetary
Fund. Lagarde blasted outsized executive pay in high finance, attacked bankers
for lobbying against needed new regulations, and called for more “robust social
safety nets.”
Oxfam,
for its part, is calling for much bolder action to narrow the stunning gap
between the global uber-rich and everyone else. The group is urging world
leaders to commit their nations “to reducing inequality to at least 1990
levels.”
Meeting
that goal, the new Oxfam report relates, would require a wide range of measures
— everything from higher income tax rates on the richest of the rich to pay
caps that limit how much corporate executives can take home to a fixed multiple
of the wages that go to their lowest-paid workers.
Oxfam
also prescribes cracking down on offshore tax havens, a prime contributor to
global inequality. As much as a quarter of the world’s wealth now sits shielded
offshore.
Don’t
hold your breath waiting for the Davos crowd to buy into any of this bold
agenda. Even the modest reforms that the IMF’s Lagarde is urging found limited
support among the corporate and banking movers and shakers who ambled up to the
Alps for this year’s gathering.
One
American on hand for the festivities, JPMorgan Chase
chief exec Jamie Dimon, made no move to hide his distaste for reformers. Bank
regulators, he charged, were “trying to do too much, too fast” — and spreading
“huge misinformation” about the noble work underway at banks like his.
“We’re
doing the right thing,” Dimon assured his fellow notables.
Other
global corporate notables at Davos sang a similar tune. Azim Premji, the
chairman of the Bangalore-based Indian high-tech giant Wipro, admitted that the
new Oxfam data — on how the richest 100 people in the world are earning much
more than enough to end the world’s worst poverty — do “sadden” him.
But Premji
declined in an interview
to term the incredible concentration of the world’s wealth in any way “unethical.”
We need not waste time, he suggested, worrying about “redistribution.” We need
instead to help the rich grasp their “obligation,” their “trusteeship
responsibility,” to wield their wealth for good.
Trust
the rich, in other words, to solve our problems.
Not
on your life, says Oxfam.
“In
a world where even basic resources such as land and water are increasingly
scarce,” Oxfam’s Jeremy Hobbs sums up, “we cannot afford to concentrate assets
in the hands of a few and leave the many to struggle over what’s left.”
OtherWords columnist Sam
Pizzigati is an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow. His latest book
is The Rich Don't
Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American
Middle Class.
OtherWords.org
