Locusts, disasters and the other side of climate inequality.
Locusts, climate loss and inequality In the summer of 2020, when the world was reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, Kenya and other drought-stricken countries in East Africa were hit by a plague of locusts. It was a truly biblical moment. Millions of these voracious insects…
Are rich people psychopaths?
Some years back, I went to visit a friend of mine from college who was staying with a very rich author whilst completing an internship in London. He lived in a massive house in Battersea, a rich area next to the river Thames. Looking round…
AS HUNGER SURGES, HERE ARE THREE WAYS INDIA CAN TACKLE ITS MASSIVE INEQUALITY
In our latest blog for Davos 2023, Amitabh Behar introduces the India supplement to Oxfam’s Davos report, which reveals how just 5% of Indians own more than 60% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom half of the population have 3% In the past three years the…
WELCOME TO THE ERA OF ‘GREEDFLATION’
Corporations that dominate food and fuel markets have been using the war and pandemic as a smokescreen to bump up their prices much more than their costs. Oxfam’s Alex Maitland explains how increased corporate profits have driven at least half of inflation. Open an economics…
THE SUPER-RICH PAY LOWER TAXES THAN YOU – AND HERE’S HOW THEY DO IT…
How do the wealthy get away with paying a lower percentage of their income and wealth in taxes than ordinary people? A big part of the answer is that many of their fortune streams – from dividends to inheritance – are chronically undertaxed, says Chiara…
WHETHER IN ASIA, AFRICA OR NORTH AMERICA, IT’S BEEN A PROFITABLE POLYCRISIS FOR BILLIONAIRES
Around the world it seems the pandemic and surging food and fuel prices have actually boosted the wealth of the super-rich, even as they pushed hundreds of millions of ordinary people into misery and penury, says Anthony Kamande in our second blog for Davos 2023….
TAXATION OF THE SUPER-RICH HAS COLLAPSED: AS ONE IN EIGHT PEOPLE GO TO BED HUNGRY, THAT SIMPLY HAS TO CHANGE
When even millionaires are pleading to be taxed so governments can tackle our colliding global crises, we can see there’s something rotten in the state of economic policy. Max Lawson introduces Oxfam’s 2023 Davos report, ‘Survival of the Richest: How we must tax the super-rich now…
Two big reasons why popular thinking about tax undermines the fight against inequality
By Max Lawson The unfairness of the UK tax system, a story in five charts, and what this tells us Our next Davos paper goes into some detail on taxing the richest people, and whilst working on it with my brilliant colleagues I did some…
Carbon Billionaires
By Max Lawson The growing anger at the carbon emissions of the super-rich The carbon emissions of the luxury consumption of the super-rich are gaining more and more coverage and rightly making a lot of people very angry. This week saw protests at the giant…
Sweden the Country of Inequality; The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2022
By Max Lawson One of the most unequal countries in Europe Imagine a country where up until the early 20th century, the number of votes you had depended on how rich you were. Where a member of the least wealthy group got one vote, but…