Richest 1% will own more than all the rest by 2016

You'd probably also be surprised at just how many millionaires who used to work in factories there are. 40 years of union wages, plus pension, plus investing in a mutual fund. I obviously can't prove it here, but I'm from a blue-collar factory city and trust me, some of those people have multi-million dollar retirement funds.

Granted, you can't replicate that kind of success today, but there are people who didn't work "elite" jobs in possession of millions.

My problems:

1. Percentages: the article talks in percentages, as if something tangible was lost from 50-45%. Here is the table of wealth by year in total vs the bottom 50%:

year Total($bil) 50% ($bn)

2000 $117,052.00 $702.31

2001 $113,390.00 $793.73

2002 $122,757.00 $859.30

2003 $147,566.00 $1,032.96

2004 $166,018.00 $1,162.13

2005 $171,182.00 $1,198.27

2006 $195,941.00 $1,763.47

2007 $220,043.00 $2,200.43

2008 $189,877.00 $1,708.89

2009 $205,656.00 $1,850.90

2010 $216,084.00 $2,593.01

2011 $224,382.00 $2,243.82

2012 $238,089.00 $2,142.80

2013 $255,620.00 $1,789.34

2014 $263,242.00 $1,842.69

    +224.89% +262.38%

Besides which, isn't that F^$%^&$ing amazing! That the bottom 50% areover 2 and a half times richer. That is world changing for the people it affects, surely? Yet the story is the rich have more. Really, "Rich have more" is the story? I can't wait for "water is wet" as installment 2.

More importantly, why is the story not the drop from 2010 to 2014? What was that?

So I sought out the source: https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fi... and it appears that the wealth in the bottom 50% is made up mostly of mostly of two things (see figure 8, page 12): 1. Poor nations - e.g. Africa and, largest of all, India which accounts "... for over a quarter of people in the bottom half of the distribution". 2. Ruch Americans in debt - the tail seems skewed that way, to me at least.

If we take just India, they had a massive currency exchange problem vs the USD since 2010. In 2010, it was 46.21 rupee to the dollar, in December 2014 it was 62.8 (http://www.x-rates.com/average/?from=USD&to=INR&amount=1&yea...). That is a drop of about a third in value. That is likely at least part of the reason for the wealth drop.

2. The percentage projection carries on from what looks like an historical anomaly between 2010 and 2014. If the currency exchange reverses course, and India claws back even 10% of the gap, the percentage to the 1% will likely reverse to some degree.

3. The data set for the rich changes dramatically. The minimum to be top 80 in 2014, would be top 15 in 2004. Zuckerberg appears out of nowhere in 2011, adding a few billion (his wealth versus the 81st position) to the total from nowhere. If Wallmart's founder had survived, we'd have a top 80 with 4 more billionaires in it, making it an even larger a total. That's not really indicative of anything (other than rich people can die too).

Look, I get Oxfam's political agenda, but I think a +262.38% increase in wealth for the bottom 50% - even after what looks like a currency disaster since 2010 - is amazing in and of itself, and any comparison to an arbitrary set of extremely wealthy is just political machinations.

Are you honestly trying to suggest that someone with $2.5m to their name isn't wealthy? Wow.

In feudalism, land ownership implies the obligation to protect the inhabitants and gives them certain rights. One remnant of this is that, in Britain, you have the right to walk on the undeveloped private property of others. Also, most European countries afford renters much stronger rights than the US does.

Many nomadic societies, from the Mongols to native Americans, don't recognize the right to own real estate you're not currently using. Sharia law has the concept that land can be unowned by anyone, and can revert to that state if unused, although many Islamic countries do not do that in practice.

So no, property rights do not stem from "natural law".

Their headline is based on a report by Credit Suisse [1] which defines net worth as: "the marketable value of financial assets plus non-financial assets (principally housing and land) less debts."

Consider two people who will earn exactly the same amount of money at every stage of their lives. But one is 18 and has just started working, the other is 65 and has just retired. Is the 65 year old really 1000x richer than the 18 year old, because the 18 year old has saved $100 so far and the 65 year old has had time to save $100,000? Is this really 1000x inequality? For the purposes of determining inequality, these people should be considered equal, because it's simply the case that one person is older and has had more time to save.

A fair assessment of a person's wealth, at least when determining fairness and inequality, should include more than this. It should include an estimate of their future earnings potential plus the social security/welfare state entitlements and state pensions that they are entitled to.

Otherwise you have hundreds of millions of people in the West with negative "wealth" who in reality will enjoy a far wealthier life than someone in the developing world with small positive financial assets and no debt.

Someone with $100 in assets and no debt does not get to claim that they are single handedly "richer" than the combined net worth of tens of millions of university graduates that each have a total career earnings potential of millions of dollars, but who each still have outstanding student debt and thus negative net worth.

Also see this article on the "the wealthy living paycheck to paycheck" [2] which points out that people that will enjoy very wealthy lifestyles are spending rather than saving their income, and therefore really are rich yet will be written off as being far "poorer" than others in terms of financial assets.

[1] http://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/inde... [2] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/25/wealthy-amer...