Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

As the rich get richer and Trump takes power, Davos Man should be very afraid

Also in Any Other Business: explaining the FTSE 100’s movements, and President Trump’s exciting ambassadors

I’ve objected before to the fact that supporters of Oxfam shops are unknowingly funding not only an aid charity but also a left-wing thinktank that promotes its beliefs with considerably more zest and clout than Jeremy Corbyn does. Its latest paper, An Economy for the 99%, issued to coincide with the gathering of the global elite at Davos, offers a killer factoid: that whereas three years ago the richest 85 people on the planet ‘had the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of humanity’, today that equivalence applies to just eight mega-billionaires, led by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Amancio Ortega, founder of the Spanish fashion chain Zara.

The Oxfam polemic, written by Deborah Hardoon, does not address the point that most of today’s giant fortunes are rewards for giant leaps in technology and choice that benefit billions of citizens, and would never have been created at all under the kind of redistributive regime Oxfam advocates. Indeed it entirely ignores the positive contribution of entrepreneurship to human progress. But still it illuminates the uncomfortable truth that the rich have been getting richer (at a claimed rate of 11 per cent per annum since 2009) while the poor have not. Davos Man may discuss inequality de haut en bas, but has no plan to narrow that gap and should be very afraid of its long-term consequences — of which the bizarre harbinger is the coronation of Trump.

Hardoon’s other sword-thrusts include the assertion, with which any man-in-the-street poll might nowadays agree, that ‘corruption and cronyism distort markets at the expense of ordinary people’. It’s not clear whether the bribery allegations behind Rolls-Royce’s £671 million settlement with US, UK and Brazilian authorities this week involved harm to ‘ordinary people’, but they certainly harm the reputation of a company whose name is supposed to be a synonym for British excellence.

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