(Roughly) Daily

Last year saw the biggest increase in billionaires in history, one more every two days. This huge increase could have ended global extreme poverty seven times over. 82% of all wealth created in the last year went to the top 1%, and nothing went to the bottom 50%.

Dangerous, poorly paid work for the many is supporting extreme wealth for the few. Women are in the worst work, and almost all the super-rich are men. Governments must create a more equal society by prioritizing ordinary workers and small-scale food producers instead of the rich and powerful…

Late last month, Oxfam released its annual Inequality Report.  As Felix Salmon observes, it’s powerful stuff:

At the end of this crazy bull market, it’s always worth remembering just how enormous the big winners’ gains have been.

Specifically, the world’s billionaires – the richest 2,000 people on the planet – saw their wealth increase by a staggering $762 billion in just one year. That’s an average of $381 million apiece. If those billionaires had simply been content with staying at their 2016 wealth, and had given their one-year gains to the world’s poorest people instead, then extreme poverty would have been eradicated. Hell, they could have eradicated extreme poverty, at least in theory, by giving up just one seventh of their annual gains.

Oxfam is absolutely right, then, to shine a light on the extreme inequality of the world in 2017. Wealth creation is all well and good, but giving new wealth primarily to the world’s billionaires is literally the worst possible way to distribute it. Oxfam’s longstanding proposal for a wealth tax on billionaires makes perfect sense. They don’t need the money; the world’s poorest do. What’s more, as the Oxfam report details, the top 1% too often make their money by exploiting the very poor. Nothing about this is just, especially when a good 35% of billionaire wealth was simply inherited…

You can download the report (pdf) here; it is well worth the read.

* Nelson Mandela

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As we rethink “fair’s fair,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1826 that University College London was founded.  Originally known as London University, it was inspired by the (then) radical ideas of Jeremy Bentham (one of the founders) and created as an alternative to the Anglican universities of Oxford and Cambridge.  UCL was the first secular university in the UK (admitting students regardless of their religion) and the first to admit women.  It is currently the third largest university in the United Kingdom by total enrollment (and largest by postgraduate enrollment), and is consistently ranked among the top universities in the world.

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