It’s the meme that refuses to die. It started, back in 2011, with the Waltons: six members of the family, we were repeatedly told, were worth as much as the bottom 30% of all Americans combined. I tried to address this silly stat back then, but now it’s gone global: back in January, Oxfam announced that the world’s 85 richest people had the same wealth as the bottom half of the global population. And now Forbes has come along to say that, actually, it’s not 85 people — it’s a mere 67.
Oxfam does a pretty bad job of footnoting its report, but I did manage to finally track down how it arrived at this conclusion. The 85 (or 67) number is easy: you just start at the top of the Forbes billionaires list, and start counting up the combined wealth until you reach $1.7 trillion. The harder question is: where does the $1.7 trillion number come from?