Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds

This is misleading. It counts debt as negative. This means a person who has zero wealth and zero debt will have more wealth than bottom 5% of people cumulatively (their wealth cancels out due to debt).

It would be misleading to suggest that a single person with zero wealth has more wealth than 100k people’s wealth combined. But that’s what this headline and report are doing.

FTA: The authoritative World Inequality Report 2026, based on data compiled by 200 researchers, also found that the top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90% combined, while the poorest half captures less than 10% of total global earnings.

The report puts the threshold for being in the top 10% of income earners at €65.5K. I suspect many HN users would fall into this category.

Related: is there a way to estimate what the wealth inequality was like pre-industrial revolution? It occured to me that in an era of kings, queens, aristocrats, and nobles it might be similar to what we see today. Without concluding whether it is right or wrong, would it have been very different for the bottom 90% in terms of inequality? Is it just the ‘who’ that makes up the very top of the wealth and income charts that is different?

I think a very problematic aspect of this is self-perception.

People that see (growing) wealth inequality as a problem rarely perceive themselves as part of it, but e.g. anyone complaining about the "top 1%" on this forum is pretty likely to be part of the "problem" themselves, globally speaking.

I think that for a lot of issues "people richer than us" are mostly a convenient scapegoat to shift the blame upstream, e.g. with CO2 emissions: If you're an average "western" citizen, then you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability, and pointing at celebrities and their private jets or somesuch is no better than thinly veiled whataboutism in my view.

Let’s first agree that it’s misleading. A new born baby has more wealth than bottom 1 million peoples wealth cumulatively according to this metric. That’s ridiculous.

I did some quick math: the top .001% consumes as much as bottom 3% of Americans cumulatively. It’s high but it gives an accurate picture of how bad the real problem is.