Richest 1% to own more than rest of world, Oxfam says

Most people who are wealthy have wealthy parents. It is overwhelmingly the most common way to become wealthy. Virtually nobody makes it to &quot;the top&quot; solely through hard work. Wealthy people always extol the virtues of hard work, but the truth is that there is no amount of hard work will necessarily make you successful. There are too many people waiting with outstretched hands to take advantage of you, or feet waiting to trip you — mostly to assure that you don&#x27;t threaten their success in this negative-sum game.<p><a href="http://www.monbiot.com/2011/11/07/the-self-attribution-fallacy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.monbiot.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;11&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-self-attribution-falla...</a>

It&#x27;s bizarre to me that people prefer to focus on how much somebody owns rather than if he earned it honestly. If a person didn&#x27;t steal, cheat or coerced anybody in the process of making his money, he is entitled to it. I don&#x27;t care how rich he is, because he didn&#x27;t do anything bad to anybody else.<p>Then of course people say &quot;but greed&quot;. Yes, as if only rich people are greedy and you are not.

According to <a href="http://www.globalrichlist.com/wealth" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.globalrichlist.com&#x2F;wealth</a> you qualify as a global 1 percenter if your net wealth is &gt;= $770,000. That makes you the 45,045,226th richest person on earth.

It appears the report measures wealth rather than income. One can have negative wealth if the value of one&#x27;s debt is greater than one&#x27;s assets. A corollary is: If debt is eliminated, a lot of inequality goes out the window too - since one man&#x27;s debt is another&#x27;s asset, and the poorest have more debt than everyone else.

More or less covered a similar statistic - that the wealthiest 1% own more than the rest put together (totally not true) or that the wealthiest 1% own more than the bottom 50% combined (true but not in a useful or interesting way).<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04xf1d5" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;programmes&#x2F;b04xf1d5</a><p>To be in the top 1% you need net assets of over about £500,000 - and this includes your house if you&#x27; e paid off the mortgage.

80 rich people now have as much as 50% of the rest of humanity combined.<p><a href="http://qz.com/329099/80-rich-people-now-have-as-much-as-50-of-the-rest-of-humanity-combined/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;329099&#x2F;80-rich-people-now-have-as-much-as-50-o...</a>

And we call ourselves &quot;civilized&quot;...