{"id":6882,"date":"2017-02-01T07:39:45","date_gmt":"2017-02-01T07:39:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6882"},"modified":"2017-02-01T07:39:45","modified_gmt":"2017-02-01T07:39:45","slug":"oxfams-minivan-of-mammon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2017\/02\/01\/oxfams-minivan-of-mammon\/","title":{"rendered":"Oxfam's minivan of Mammon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2017\/01\/20\/oxfams-careful-arithmetic\/\">wrote<\/a> the other day about Oxfam's careful arithmetic in its showcasing of how so much wealth is owned by so few. \u00a08 billionaires, says Oxfam, own more\u00a0[ $426bn ] than\u00a0half the world's population [ $409bn ]. \u00a0Not so, says the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/news\/finance-and-economics\/21715043-oxfams-headline-grabbing-comparison-has-some-flaws-are-eight-men-wealthy-half\">Economist<\/a>, it's actually 7 as the $409bn \u00a0should really be $384bn, and so one M. Bloomberg need not be counted. \u00a0A \"magnificent seven\", then. \u00a0But all this is to invest a lot of value into some shakey data, and to accept Oxfam's accountancy in the first place. \u00a0To make it all work, they had to add in the negative $357bn that is owned (owed, that is), by some 21m Americans.<\/p>\n<p>The Economist also says that if the sums had been done at 'purchasing-power-parity' rather than at market exchange rates (which is valid because $$$s go farther in poor countries), then the bottom half of the world's population would have 10.6% of the wealth and not Oxfam's 0.15%.<\/p>\n<p>It's still not a lot, but why does Oxfam open itself up to needless criticism when its message is already strong?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wrote the other day about Oxfam's careful arithmetic in its showcasing of how so much wealth is owned by so few. \u00a08 billionaires, says Oxfam, own more\u00a0[ $426bn ] than\u00a0half the world's population [ $409bn ]. \u00a0Not so, says...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6882\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}