Xjyuk

Bernie Sanders, who is running for president in 2020 gave a speech a few days ago. He makes a claim which goes like the following:

Today the world's richest 26 billionaires, 26, now own as much wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion people on the planet, half of the world's population.
Link to video

This is a surprising figure, at least to me (though maybe it shouldn't be.) I'm just wondering if it's true.

Short Answer: True.

Every year, in time for Davos (i.e. the Annual Meeting for the World Economic Forum), Oxfam releases a report about the state of inequality. Here's a link to their latest. Additional link to calculations down at the bottom of the page.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2019-01-18/billionaire-fortunes-grew-25-billion-day-last-year-poorest-saw

I'm pretty sure the US senator was referring to that.

Now, a couple of things to note:

1. If Oxfam's research were bad (it's pretty darn good), it would be discredited by many many business folk and of course top-rated economists - especially since they habitually present this at the most august fora they can get into. The WEF is up there, obviously.




2. While Oxfam reports are "grey literature", serious academics like Sen, Stiglitz and Piketty have made the same point over the past 10 years, albeit differently nuanced - academic writing generally does not aim at the same shock factor that INGOs aspire to.




3. There is a distinction between income inequality, wealth inequality... and other important inequalities (e.g. gender). Oxfam's 26 vs 3.8 Billion refers to wealth inequality.

That statistic is at least plausible, and likely true. Children have essentially no wealth, so to start out the richest are already ahead of about 25% of the world (about 1.9 billion people) simply by having a positive net worth. The next 1.9 billion is made up of the impoverished adults, young adults that are just starting careers, working class populations, and middle class adults.

Wealth is misleading when used as a statistic because it's largely a function of saving over time, the rule of thumb for savings is that they double about every 7 years when invested wisely. The top 26 billionaires are people that have been extremely wealthy for decades. The thing to keep in mind with these numbers is that the average retiree will also have as much wealth as about 50-60% of that number, simply because most haven't had time to accumulate any wealth.

Technically true, but misleading. First, this includes people with supposedly "negative" net worth, a questionable concept, and this "negative" net wealth is added to other people's positive net wealth, as if one person's debt cancels out another person's assets. Second, "net wealth" refers to particular categories of wealth that are

1. measurable
   
   and
   


2. important in Western capitalist societies.

If someone takes out a student loan, the value of the loan is included in their "net wealth", but the value of the education is not. If someone lives in a culture without the concept of money, their "net wealth" could very well be considered to be zero, or negligible, even if their web of social connections gives them access to a large amount of resources.

So, basically, the 26 people who have done the best at playing the Western capitalist game have more points than 3.8 billion people put together, many of whom are playing a completely different game. I'm sure the 26 top tennis players have scored more tennis points that the bottom 3.8 billion people put together, too.

If by "wealth", we mean "utility available from resources one has access to", then this claim, as your intuition told you, is absurd.