Oxfam, the leftwing NGO devoted to poverty relief has released a new report blaming poverty in wealth inequality. In other words, its central claim is that the existence of very wealthy people creates poverty.

The report is largely just an extended op-ed that asserts that the existence of some very wealthy people is the cause of poverty in the world. Notable buzzwords and phrases include “trickle down,” “obscene levels of inequality,” and “neoliberalism.”

The “solution” to the alleged problem, which should surprise no one, is a list of taxes that should be either introduced or raised significantly, including higher income taxes, “a tax on financial transactions,” a “global wealth tax,” and a so-called “anonymous wealth tax.”

These taxes, we are told, will put an end to the poverty-causing inequality that now is a global crisis.

But there's a problem for Oxfam in this data. The report never actually demonstrates that inequality causes poverty, or how it does it. It does claim that many wealthy people are getting richer faster than poor people. As Marketwatch sums up:

Oxfam said new data from its report “An Economy for the 99%,” shows that between 1988 and 2011, the incomes of the poorest 10% rose by just $3 a year, while incomes of the richest 1% increased 182 times that much. In 2015, the world’s richest 1% held on to their share of global wealth, owning vastly more than the other 99%, said the charity.

Even this statement is questionable, as Felix Salmon points out at Fusion. The way the report calculates wealth has a tenuous relationship with reality:

The result is that if you use Oxfam’s methodology, my niece, with 50 cents in pocket money, has more wealth than the bottom 40% of the world’s population combined. As do I, and as do you, most likely, assuming your net worth is positive. You don’t need to find eight super-wealthy billionaires to arrive at a shocking wealth statistic; you can take just about anybody.

Economist Mateusz Machaj adds at mises.org:

[I]f you put 30 dollars into your bank account, does it mean that you caused extreme poverty for 10% of the world population? This is what Oxfam is implying in its biased pseudo-economic analysis.

But, let's just a for minute accept Oxfam's central claim that the rich are getting rich faster than the poor. This in itself tells us something. It used to be that we were told “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.”

Note, however that Oxfam does not claim this. They can't claim this because the poor are not getting poorer.

In fact, the the global poor have more access to basic necessities and wealth than ever before.

Global Poverty Is In Decline

But, as this data shows, global poverty has been declining for decades:

Moreover, given that “extreme poverty” as defined by the World Bank no longer even exists in the wealthy “global north,” this …read more

Source: Inequality Doesn’t Create Poverty

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