Oxfam rant a Louw point

What is it with Leon Louw and his columns trashing estimates of global inequality? In his latest diatribe, he attacked Oxfam’s statement that “the world’s richest eight white men have more than the poorest 50%” as “manifest absurdity” (Huffington Post flak highlights politically correct balderdash, April 26).

If Louw had bothered to check the Oxfam report concerned, An Economy for the 99 Per Cent, he would have discovered that its calculations are drawn from Forbes billionaires lists and the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2016. Oxfam’s reports are meticulously argued, their factual data sourced from bodies such as the World Economic Forum’s global risk report, the World Bank, official statistics and peer-reviewed academic literature.

When Credit Suisse reports about wealth distribution, it indicates clearly that it is referring to private wealth. In other words, it is not referring to state-owned wealth. If this is Louw’s objection, he should say so. As for his assertion that the world’s richest eight men own not only less than 1% of global GDP but “less than the value of annual peanut consumption”, he overlooks that these peanuts are not common property. Before they are sold to consumers, they are largely owned by agri-corporations whose shares are in turn privately owned and count as financial assets.

Meanwhile, the acclaimed work of Thomas Piketty — another of Louw’s targets — needs little defence, based as it is on an extraordinary analysis of national accounts in leading western countries and other official statistics dating back well over a century. Louw needs to clarify on what basis he is right and where the global institutions are wrong.

Otherwise, I don’t see why readers should pay good money to read his claptrap.

Roger Southall Department of Sociology, Wits University