{UAH} Are 26 billionaires worth more than half the planet? The debate, explained.

Here's a wild statistic: The 26 richest people on earth in 2018 had the same net worth as the poorest half of the world's population, some 3.8 billion people.  That statistic, which comes from the charity group Oxfam, is a bit of an annual tradition. Every year, to mark the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — that yearly convocation of the world's richest and most self-important plutocrats — Oxfam puts out a statement that "the top [X] people have the same amount of wealth as the bottom" half, as the Center for Global Development's Maya Forstater and Vijaya Ramachandran once generalized it. In 2018, X was equal to 26, and as it does every year, the stat went viral.

This year, Oxfam's report added another shocking stat. The report also claims that 2,200 billionaires worldwide saw their wealth grow by 12 percent (which is eminently believable), even as the poorest half saw its wealth fall by 11 percent (which is a bit harder to believe at a time when global poverty is consistently falling).

Oxfam's "the top X people have the same wealth as the bottom half" claim has received plenty of scrutiny in the past from folks like Forstater and Ramachandran, Felix Salmon, Chris Giles, and Vox's Ezra Klein. Critics note that the Oxfam data includes heavily indebted people in the rich world (like a medical resident with med school debt) as among the poorest people on Earth, which distorts the results. Oxfam for its part has responded forcefully to the criticism. But the claim that the poorest people in the world have seen their wealth fall has gotten less scrutiny.

  https://www-vox-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2019/1/22/18192774/oxfam-inequality-report-2019-davos-wealth?usqp=mq331AQFKAGwASA%3D&fbclid=IwAR3xJBRrWyqQRf5q3iohNH-4au9OUxlk46-GzNTWWXv13mrxJ1Q9bKWHQX4&amp_js_v=0.1#aoh=15860334585928&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Ffuture-perfect%2F2019%2F1%2F22%2F18192774%2Foxfam-inequality-report-2019-davos-wealth

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"When a man is stung by a bee, he doesn't set off to destroy all beehives"

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