Philip Booth is guilty of wishful thinking when he questions our figures showing that the richest 1 per cent will next year own more wealth than the rest of us combined (Davos may be misguided but Oxfam is misleading, 23 January).
He claims that this short-term projection is wrong because recent increases in wealth inequality are solely the result of quantitative easing, which “is unlikely to be repeated”. This is questionable on a number of fronts; not least as it came around the same time as the European Central Bank announced a new US$60 billion QE package. It also exposes the truth that government policies to combat the economic crisis have, deliberately or otherwise, overwhelmingly benefited the richest rather than those who need help the most.
Mr Booth’s suggestion that our figures are meaningless because they include indebted graduates is also nonsense. If you remove all those with negative wealth from the figures – which incidentally were taken from Credit Suisse’s respected World Wealth Databook – then there is only a negligible fall in the 1 per cent’s share of global wealth from 48.1 to 47.9 per cent.
Rather than desperately search for reasons to deny reality or bemoan the fact that Oxfam is tackling the problems affecting poor people today instead of those of the 1970s, we would urge Mr Booth to join us in looking for solutions to inequality – a problem described by Pope Francis recently as the "root of social evil" and which is one of the major barriers to faster progress in reducing poverty.
Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva, Oxfam Head of Research, Oxford
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