He explains how the effect of the Middle East war is going to move beyond borders through energy prices, food prices and security and consequently high cost of living, hitting the poorest of the population the hardest. Drawing on the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, Adam shows how these shocks consistently deepen inequality, hitting the most vulnerable hardest.

He unpacks the central role of the Gulf countries in global supply chains, from oil and gas to fertilisers and industrial materials, and how disruptions in the region can drive inflation, strain food systems, and raise the cost of living worldwide.

The conversation also explores the risks of continued dependence on fossil fuels, and why responding to these interconnected crises requires international cooperation rather than fragmented, national responses.

If you enjoy the episode, please like, share, comment, and leave us a review. Follow us on X @EQUALShope, Bluesky and on LinkedIn.

Sir Humphrey, the quintessential obfuscating bureaucrat. If you click on the picture it should take you to the clip.

It is timeless classic because it captures a feeling about the way bureaucracy and politicians interact. Bureaucrats run rings around the politicians to ensure nothing is ever done, and the politicians are weak, self-interested and easily hoodwinked by the bureaucrats. You are left laughing about just how inept government and politicians are.

In more recent years, there have been a rash of new political dramas, for example ‘The Thick of It’ about UK politics or ‘Veep’ about US politics. ‘House of Cards’, was originally made by the BBC about UK politics was successfully transposed to the US. In Brazil, the show ‘O Mecanismo’ or ‘The Whirlwind’ in Korea were both very negative, portraying politicians and politics as broadly corrupt and self-serving.

What all these programmes have in common is an even deeper cynicism about politicians and government. They tend to focus on the self-interested motivations of the characters, and through this, focus on traits of ‘artifice, pandering, deceit and positioning for advantage- in general mistrustfulness’. If values and morals are mentioned, it is usually to be derided and mocked, mainly as weaknesses.

The West Wing- I have always striven and entirely failed to be as cool and unflappable as Leo (right) the Presidents Chief of Staff

Not all political dramas are entirely cynical; ‘Borgen’ in Denmark started off pretty idealistic- although it did get increasingly cynical as the series progressed. Another wildly successful series was ‘The West Wing’, which was about a pragmatic but progressive and value driven US President and his team trying to do his best to make the world a better place. It was felt by many at the time to be Hollywood’s answer to the real-world disappointments of the Clinton and Bush Presidencies.

One scientific study actually measured participants level of cynicism before and after watching episodes of ‘The West Wing’ or ‘House of Cards’ and found that House of Cards did increase people’s negativity about politics considerably.

Who benefits most from people becoming cynical about politics and politicians?

I think arguably broad cynicism with all politicians and government benefits those on the right of the political spectrum more than the left. Such cynicism drives down participation in democracy and a belief that voting can ever make a difference. Usually, the first to stop voting and exercising their democratic rights are the poorest people too.

As perhaps further evidence of this, ‘Yes Minister’ was one of Mrs Thatcher’s and Friedrich von Hayek’s favourite programmes. It was co-written by Anthony Jay, who was a close collaborator with right wing free market think tanks, and a speechwriter for Conservative politicians.

Well organised democratic politics is I think the most powerful yet peaceful mechanism ever invented to put the brakes on runaway capitalism and extreme inequality. It follows that anything that drives up political apathy and drives down political participation ultimately harms politicians on the left more than the right, as even if politicians on the right lose trust, the outcome is more power given to market forces.

Is art just imitating life?

But are these dramas just reflecting reality? Are they just showing us, in very funny ways, the reality of politicians, as entirely self-serving? I think many reading this will be thinking that these comedies are holding up a dark mirror to a dark reality; that politicians are indeed all the same, and united in their dishonesty, ambition and self-interest.

My own feeling is that this is neither fair nor accurate.

This is not to deny that in many countries, all leading politicians are terrible. That is clearly the case, and depressingly often. But just because it is often the case empirically, doesn’t mean that it is somehow an a priori fact. To put it another way, the fact that all of today’s politicians are useless and cynical does not mean we can conclude that all politicians are useless and cynical at all times and in all places.

(Arguably too this could in some ways become a self-fulfilling prophesy, as the more that politics is presented as an entirely cynical endeavour, the more it is likely to attract those the kinds of characters who operate primarily in this way, and the more it is likely to put better, more value driven individuals off pursuing politics- what has been described elsewhere as a spiral of cynicism).

Equally, just because politicians exhibit self-interested or other behaviours, does not mean that this is their only, or even their main motivation. We know from life, that unlike Hollywood, people are complicated; people do things for multiple reasons, often combining both values and self-interest.

Even the most moral politicians need to be good at politics

I would also say that political skills are essential for a good politician, which might seem obvious, but is an important point. The best politicians need to find ways to out manoeuvre their opponents and out communicate them too. Skills of building constituencies of support, of deal making, compromise, strategy- all of these are important if politicians are going to secure real change. The key thing I think is not that these skills are bad necessarily, but that they don’t become an end in themselves, but are instead deployed with the aim of securing real, progressive change. It is also pretty useless arguably to have unimpeachable moral values and commitments but never have the political skills to really achieve anything. Politics free values are as ineffective as value free politics in many ways.

Julius Nyerere, first President of Tanzania, with President John F Kennedy

If you think of the most successful, progressive politicians in history, whether independence leaders like Nehru in India or Nyerere in Tanzania, or progressive leaders like FDR in the US or Clement Attlee in the UK, all of them combined strong political skills with a strong commitment to building a better world for ordinary people. They were not saints, but neither were their actions reducible to naked self-interest either. On the other side, I think right wing politicians like Mrs Thatcher cannot be simply reduced to cynical self-interest; they were also driven by values too.

Defending Democracy

The recent summit hosted by Spain in Barcelona of world leaders coming together to defend democracy was to my mind a good example of politicians collectively pushing for a better world. The Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez, has been particularly vocal in his opposition to war, and championing of the fight against inequality. He is clearly driven by values, but at the same time is an extremely successful politician who has managed to side-step many seemingly existential threats to his career and his government and consistently deliver progressive policies in Spain.

It is interesting and clever I think that these left-leaning leaders have chosen to brand their summit as a ‘Defence of Democracy’. Democracy is normally perceived as a good in itself, something above ideologies of left and right. This I think is true. It is also true that not just the right, but the left too can be anti-democratic and authoritarian.

But equally, ultimately, I think the demise and denigration of democracy harms the powerless far more than the powerful. This is because politics offers a way to balance human interests that is an alternative to a balance based instead on wealth or power.

So, I think we need to fight the cynical rejection of politics. We must always maintain that politicians are not all the same. That it is vital that we support politicians who are good at politics whilst strongly focused on building a better world.

You’d think that the argument for phasing out fossil fuels couldn’t be stronger right now. Beyond the devastation global warming is bringing the planet, there is a clear case for renewables providing energy security. But instead, the dominant narrative, pushed by fossil fuel interests, seems to be to drill for more oil and gas.

As governments convene in Santa Marta as part of a collation of the willing to phase out fossil fuels, this week’s Bulletin looks at how oil and gas companies are profiting from the current crisis.

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Big oil profits, in numbers

Six oil giants are on track to earn nearly $3,000 every second in 2026. Using consensus estimates, which is the average of the forecasts that financial analysis make, the Big 6 oil companies are on track to make a combined $94 billion, which is enough to provide solar power for the energy needs of almost 50 million people in Africa.

Dividends of war. The fossil fuel business was already making rich shareholders a nice return and the disruption caused by war is estimated to add $13 billion to their profits – a 17% increase compared to 2025.

While families suffer. Food and energy price increases hit the worst off the hardest. People in the poorest countries spend 2.4 times more on food as a proportion of their income than people in high-income countries. The UN estimate that the war could push 30 million people into poverty.

Public support for change. While right-wing politicians and media push to drill for more oil, the public support progressive policies. In an Oxfam commissioned survey across seven countries, three times as many citizens support greater government investment in renewable energy compared to increasing fossil fuel extraction, and two thirds supported increasing taxes on the profits of large oil and gas corporations to help fund the transition to renewables.

Fossil fuel companies walking away from renewables. Just last month, ExxonMobil announced a significant reduction of a third of its planned investment in low-carbon energy projects and TotalEnergies refused to adopt a net zero transition plan aligned with 1.5 degrees.

Hope from Santa Marta? The conference comes against the backdrop what the executive director of the International Energy Agency, has called “the mother of all energy crises.” Shortages of oil and gas mean that governments aren’t only wanting to transition for climate reasons. Renewables are cheaper and more secure from geopolitical shocks than fossil fuels.

Wealthy governments still have not stepped up to provide sufficient climate financing for poorer countries to make the phase out, but Santa Marta is just the first step of the process to a just transition.

Something to read/listen to

Read this new study about how people dramatically underestimate the scale of wage inequality. Nearly everyone prefers lower wage inequality, including across political lines. Far-right voters are those most affected when presented with facts around inequality.

Here is a mind-blowing graph from the study showing the gap between what people believe and the actual ratio of CEO to worker wages.

Read about the California billionaire tax proposal that will go to the ballot.

The Equals Bulletin has been on a short break but the latest season of the Equals Podcast has been in full swing. Catch up with the latest episodes:

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Dr. Wanga Zembe-Mkabile, social policy expert and one of the Founding Committee members of the International Panel on Inequality (IPI), brings a critical perspective often missing from economic debates: the human and embodied experience of inequality. Drawing on research in social determinants of health and epidemiology, she explains how the conditions people are born into shape not only income and opportunity, but health outcomes, life expectancy, and overall well-being.

This conversation also challenges dominant ideas of meritocracy, showing how structural inequality predetermines life chances long before individuals can “compete.” It also explores why inequality is no longer just a development issue, but a global emergency with consequences for economic stability, personal well-being, security and trust in institutions.

As momentum builds behind the International Panel on Inequality, this episode examines what a global, multidisciplinary body could mean for policymakers, governments, and the development sector. Can better evidence, and better framing, drive more effective action on economic justice?

For economists, policymakers, and anyone working on inequality, this episode offers a deeper understanding of how inequality operates across systems—and why addressing it requires more than data alone.

This is the second episode in a short series on the International Panel on Inequality. In our previous episode, we were joined by and Katy Chakrabortty on the process of making the IPI and what aims to achieve.

f you enjoy the episode, please like, share, comment, and leave us a review. Follow us on X @EQUALShope, Bluesky and on LinkedIn.

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In this episode, we explore a bold new proposal from a panel of leading experts from around the world, chaired by Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz: International Panel on inequality (IPI), something similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but focused on economic inequality. The idea is to bring together the best global evidence, track progress, and give policymakers a clearer, shared foundation to act on one of the defining challenges of our time.
But building a global response to inequality is not a small task. It means navigating politics, coordinating across countries, and turning knowledge into action in a world that doesn’t always agree on the solutions. What could a panel like this realistically achieve? And what might it change about how we understand and tackle inequality?
At a time when faith in global cooperation is shaky and multilateralism is under strain, this could be a serious step forward and a test of whether the world is ready to act on inequality at the scale the crisis demands.
This is the first episode in a short series on the International Panel on Inequality. In the next episode, we’ll be joined by Dr. Wanga Zembe-Mkabile, a member of the founding committee of the IPI, to take the conversation further.

If you enjoy the episode, please like, share, comment, and leave us a review. Follow us on X @EQUALShope, Bluesky and on LinkedIn.

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A recent UK drama-docu series Dirty Business has got people across the country up in arms over private equity ownership draining UK public services. Unfortunately, Thames water is just the tip of rotting refuse mound at the core public services, for both the UK and the rest of the world.

“They are good at what they do,” confides the beleaguered and disillusioned civil engineer Mikey Lazarus in ’ new series. “After they bought us, Macquarie [private equity firm] bought up our offices and then leased them back to us.”

What the character is referring to here has a name – a very unsexy one. It is called ‘dividend recapitalisation’ and is a very common tactic for private equity firms that buy up companies delivering public goods – from water to care, ambulances to prisons – and then work quickly to drain as much money from the company as possible. Before they sell up and moving on, that is.

Watching Dirty Business reignited an old injustice furnace that was first kindled whilst working on Oxfam’s Sick Development report with former Health Lead Anna Marriott. This report examines the privatization and financialization of healthcare provision around the world, and exposes how profit-hungry private equity firms and other private actors, are buying up hospitals in low-income countries – under the guise of ‘aid’ – and then using their old tactics to bleed them dry. Naturally, those that suffer more from this vampiric approach are the patients who face inflated costs and hopelessly low standards of care. Sick Development exposes the rot at the core of a neoliberal, private-sector-first approach to development.

Listen to this EQUALS episode with Anna Marriott and Dr Aquina Thulare on the cost of health privatisation around the world.

The tactics employed by private equity firms exposed in Sick Development are not new. In fact, they have been incubated by private equity firms across the UK and the US for years before being exported into other, less regulated contexts. An old colleague, Abha Jeurkar, and I examined an existing body of research on the privatisation of the Care sector across the UK to understand the impact. Spoiler: private equity firms are draining more than just the UK’swater ways.

In the 1980s, more than 90% of beds in care homes in the UK were provided by publicly owned care homes, and only 10% by independent providers. By 2016, this was reversed, with 90% of residential care now being delivered by independent providers, predominantly for-profit organisations. In fact, three of the biggest five care home groups that currently provide 20% of publicly funded care home beds in the UK are owned by private equity.

Private equity firms typically aim to double their money in three years or treble it in five years. Such steep returns often necessitate dramatically cutting cost by gutting companies, selling large assets and making swathes of the workforce redundant: one study in the US found that private equity firms have so far been directly and indirectly responsible for 1.3 million lost jobs across several sectors.

In the care sector, this manifests in big providers squeezing their staff and seeking to “optimise” the number of beds to ensure staff costs and overheads are kept to a minimum; they favour 60 – 70 beds per homes – despite research indicating that smaller care homes of 10 beds or fewer generally provide better outcomes. This is all done so they can continue to routinely offer 11% returns to investors. In fact, analysis found that private companies running care services took a whopping £250m in profits in just three English regions over the course of three years.

And what of the residents of these care homes and their workforce? The entirely predictable outcome of this erosion of the workforce and resources is deteriorating standards in these homes, with too many residents, too few staff and too little resources to deliver a high-quality service. In one case in Lancashire, a man named Norman’s family paid £1,000 per week for his place in a care home owned by the UK’s biggest care home operator, HC-One. The quality-of-care Norman received was poor and he ultimately died after suffering two falls and a stroke. In the subsequent investigation, HC-One apologised for the standard of care that Norman received and acknowledged that there was a problem with staffing and medication at the home. Despite this, the family paid £125,000 in total by the time of Norman’s death.

In another one emblematic case, the Four Seasons Care Home group – formerly one of the UK’s largest care home groups – was bought private equity firm Alchemy Capital and subsequently underwent round after round of buyouts by different private equity firms, each buying the firm at a higher cost and issuing more debt to cover the shortfall. By 2008, Four Seasons had accrued an external debt of over £1.5 billion and were liable to pay an annual interest payment of £100 million. Four Seasons was finally forced into default for being unable to make the debt repayments, and collapsed into administration in 2019 putting the homes and futures of some 17,000 elderly and disabled people and 22,000 employees at risk. Now, Four Seasons is in the final stages of winding down, with its remaining homes sold and parent companies moving into liquidation.

Whilst there is abundant evidence on the insidious influence of private equity on care in the UK and US, this creeping financialisation extends beyond these geographies. The case of Thames Water presented after the decades long investigation of Ash Smith and Peter Hammond in Dirty Business should be seen as emblematic of both what is going on in UK public services more broadly and what is happened to global public goods around the world. With contaminated water in the UK public consciousness, the time is right to point to the rising tide of private equity ownership across a much wider range of public services – and crucially, as this blog highlights, in care.

In an age where shocking docu-dramas are seemingly manifesting more policy change than lobbyists shouting into the void – doffs cap to Gwyneth Hughes and Toby Jones – I’m left wondering, when will the series on the contagion of private equity in care take to our screens? Whilst it is great to see light being shone through the murky waters that is the Thames Water scandal, we need to widen our gaze and see this case for what it is – a symptom of the insidious role of profit-hungry private actors in public services.

END.

Author: Harry Bignell, EQUALS podcast project manager.

Listen to our latest podcast episode on inequality in Norway.

In this episode Trine Østereng unpacks the reality behind the reputation, and the answer is uncomfortable. While some aspects of Norwegian society, like incomes, remain spectacularly equal, wealth at the top is becoming increasingly concentrated, giving a small elite outsized economic and political power. For example, just 10 people in Norway own more wealth than the bottom 50%.

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From a housing system that is locking young people out of ownership, to rising poverty and the reappearance of food lines, this conversation reveals how inequality is growing in ways that are harder to see but impossible to ignore.

This episode also explores the political battles behind Norway’s wealth tax, how billionaires push back, and why tackling inequality isn’t just about lifting people out of poverty but also limiting the extreme wealth and power at the top.

If you enjoy the episode, please like, share, comment, and leave us a review. Follow us on X @EQUALShope, Bluesky and on LinkedIn.

Trine Østereng is an advisor at Think Tank Agenda and has been a host of the podcast Ut i Verden (Out in the World). She is also the author of the book Dangerous Differences: Why Great Economic Inequality Is a Social Problem

We also know that wherever there is huge market volatility and turmoil, there’s also an opportunity for shareholders to profit.

Following Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, the very richest became dramatically richer and corporate profits hit record highs. Between 2020-2022, food and energy billionaires pocketed $453 billion, with 62 new food billionaires minted. Five of the largest energy companies – BP, Shell, TotalEnergies, Exxon and Chevron – were making a combined profit of $2,600 every second, as energy prices rocketed following Russia’s invasion.

This is highly likely to repeat itself, and we’ll be analysing the impact of the war on inequality in future Bulletins. As the data in this week’s Bulletin, analysing the Forbes 40^th annual billionaires list, shows, the super-rich are starting from an even higher point than ever before.

Make sure to subscribe, as we’ll be looking specifically at war profiteers in future editions.

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The billionaire list…in numbers

Another record-shattering year for the world’s richest people. Both the number and the wealth of the world’s billionaires are at their highest levels. There are now a record 3,428 billionaires worldwide. Their combined wealth is a record $20.5 trillion, equivalent to the size of mainland China’s economy. Their wealth is equivalent to 17.1% of the global GDP, compared to less than 5% in 2010.

The world’s billionaires are $4 trillion richer than 12 months ago. This is $1.5 trillion more than the combined wealth held by the poorest 4.1 billion people in the world. An increase of about a quarter. Their number increased by 400, a 13% jump. At the top, the 10 richest billionaires are 44% richer. All in all, 4 in 5 billionaires are richer than they were last year.

A trillionaire is in sight. The world’s richest person is only $160 billion shy of becoming the first trillionaire, years earlier than projected. Elon Musk has a net wealth of $839 billion, having added around half a trillion in just a year. In fact, he’s $121 billion richer than the next three richest billionaires combined, and richer than the poorest 693 billionaires.

AI boom for billionaires. 390 people entered the billionaire club with a combined net worth of $755 billion. Artificial Intelligence (AI) played a huge role in this. 45 new AI billionaires have been created over the past 12 months, accounting for more than half of the total of 86 AI billionaires.

Technology accounts for nearly a quarter of the total wealth, which has boomed over the past 12 months. The combined wealth of billionaires in the technology industry is up nearly 50%, a $1.6 trillion jump.

The US has the most billionaires and the wealthiest. This year, billionaires span 80 countries, including, for the first time, Afghanistan. Yet most billionaires are concentrated in a few countries. The United States accounts for the most billionaires in the world, with 989, or 30% of the total, and the most wealth, $8.4 trillion, or 42% of all billionaire wealth. US billionaires are 23.4% richer than a year ago, having added $1.6 trillion to their stock of wealth.

Some countries recorded a massive increase in billionaires’ wealth. Irish billionaires are 254% richer, those in the Netherlands 243%, Canada’s 111%, Brazil’s 81%, and those in Sweden 47%.

Billionaire gender divide. It’s well known that, globally and in many countries, women own less than men. And that’s true at the very top. Women account for 14% of the total billionaire class.

More wealth at the top, increasing suffering for many. As billionaires’ wealth hit $20 trillion, much of the world’s population faces immense suffering. Some 2.3 billion people in the world are regularly facing hunger, 2.8 billion people have no adequate housing, and 2 billion are facing catastrophic out-of-pocket health spending.

Not just the wealth that should worry us. It’s not just trillions of wealth in the hands of a few, but also its impact on democratic institutions. Increasingly, we are seeing billionaires concentrate media ownership to serve their selfish interests. They are hijacking our public institutions and democracy, as we showed in this year’s Davos paper.

Something to read and listen to

Listen to K. R. Ghodsee on Equals talking about Capitalism vs Socialism: What’s Better for Women’s Rights?

Listen to Zoe Gardner and Sharon Ekambaram on how How Migrants Are Used as Scapegoats for the Real Crisis

Read Ken Opalo’s analysis of the short and medium term impacts of the U.S./Israel-Iran war.

Read what the IMF have to say about how extreme inequality is fueling a global debt crisis.

These studies show that for women under socialism, sexual relations were better, more fulfilling and more equal. The reason for this greater liberation in the bedroom is, according to , because women and men were far more equal overall in these societies. Critically, women were not nearly as economically dependent on men as they were in the West. State funded universal childcare, access to abortion and birth control, access to education, all radically reduced the unpaid care work of women and increased their economic independence. Women’s involvement in the workplace was far greater, women were scientists, engineers, even astronauts. Kristen grew up in the US, and aged 13 was inspired by Sally Ride, the first woman from the USA to go into space in 1983, only to discover that the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, had gone up in 1963, 20 years before.

Valentina went on to become a global champion of women’s rights. Ghodsee documents how in the US, the government were seriously worried about the economic advantage women’s liberation was giving their soviet competitors and commissioned a series of comparative studies on this. More broadly, she shows how competition from the second world played a key role in driving governments in the first world to do much more to legislate and take policy actions that would increase gender equality and women’s economic freedom.

Of course, gender equality was very far from perfect under socialism, and the liberation of women was in part because it made sense economically, but there is no doubt that by a range of clearly empirical and objective criteria, women were genuinely much more economically and socially equal in these societies.

It was also very much at the core of socialist ideology from the beginning. International Women’s Day itself was the proposal of the incredible German socialist and feminist activist Clara Zetkin in 1910, building on the strikes of women garment workers in New York in 1908.

Just as in the west, ideals of democratic freedom, even though far from full realised in reality, put pressure on the countries of the east, so ideals of social equality and gender equality from the countries of the east, even if never fully realised, put clear pressure on the leaders of the west.

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Money can’t buy you love

Conversely, when communism fell, and former Eastern Bloc countries adopted free market economies, economic and gender inequality rose dramatically. Women were forced out of the workplace, social safety nets were dismantled, while right wing nationalist politics encouraged a return to harmful gender roles. Women were increasingly expected to leave the workplace and return to their homes and forced to take on the unpaid care responsibilities previously taken on by the state, restoring men’s financial power within relationships. They were once more put in the position where they had to rely on men to survive, and as a result, sex, marriage and relations with men became again far more transactional. In a kind of deeply dark, 21^st century version of Jane Austen, Ghodsee gives the example of new ‘gold digger academies’ in Russia. Aspiring gold diggers pay $1000 dollars a week in the hope of developing the skills to find themselves a wealthy male sponsor. Such sponsors are called ‘Forbses’ (after the Forbes rich list) and the women are called ‘tiolki’ or cattle.

This was not a simple snap back to sexist and misogynist ideas of ‘natural’ gender roles, artificially suppressed by socialism. There was nothing natural about this, but instead the answer lies in basic economics, Ghodsee maintains. The deep inequality and insecurity that free market capitalism brought is the key driving force.

She draws the link between this experience and the sharp increase in economic inequality under neoliberal capitalism in our modern world, and the concomitant, deeply concerning rise in misogyny, sexism, violence against women. The explosion in right-wing ideas and truly nasty high-profile figures like Andrew Tate and others, focusing on returning to some mythical ‘traditional’ role for women.

This is not simply an issue of scapegoating, or distraction, with young men encouraged to hate women and blame women for their lack of economic progress, although this is definitely a part of what is going on. For Ghodsee, it has a broader economic logic too, as when fewer jobs are available, and when governments are engaged in seemingly permanent austerity, it makes sense to push women out of the workforce, and to put them once again under the economic control of men.

This is not just about incomes but wealth too. Wealth is far more gender unequal than income, so the huge rise in wealth inequality, and in the importance of income from capital rather than income from work, also puts women back in a much more unequal position, with marriage being by far the most fruitful way in the US for a woman to get into the richest 1%.

Conversely, under socialism, and under the policies pursued by socialist countries, (as well as much more equal capitalist countries like Sweden or Denmark), gender relations were steadily and comprehensively decommodified, and relations between women and men were immeasurably better as a result, based on equality, not economic necessity.

This is not the only thing that is decommodified either; more equal societies, where things like health, housing and education are provided to everyone based on need, not on ability to pay, gradually take more and more of what matters in life out of the realm of money. Modern capitalism seeks to do the opposite, to put a price on everything, to turn water, health, education, clean air, greenspaces and even friendship and love into commodities to be bought and sold. In doing so, the inherent value of these wonderful things is strained, depleted and destroyed. Putting a price on something often devalues it, the point made by the philosopher Michael Sandel in his brilliant book, ‘What money can’t buy.’ I really agree with this. I feel personally, that the more of our common life we can take out of the realm of money and of driving profit for capital, the better it will be.

ENDS.

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Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also a visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.

Listen to our episode with Kristen Ghodsee here.

In this episode, historian and gender scholar explains why economic inequality is one of the most powerful drivers of gender inequality.

Drawing on decades of research comparing socialist and capitalist societies, Ghodsee shows how policies such as universal childcare, public services, and guaranteed employment dramatically expanded women’s opportunities in the twentieth century — and why the collapse of these systems often led to renewed discrimination and inequality.

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But the story is not only historical.

We discuss how today’s surge in online misogyny, “trad-wife” narratives, and the rise of the manosphere may be connected to deeper economic transformations — including the possibility that AI-driven job disruptions could trigger a new backlash against women’s participation in the labor force.

In this conversation we explore:

• What Cold War history reveals about women’s rights

• Why inequality and patriarchy reinforce each other

• The rise of the manosphere and online misogyny

• How AI and labor market shocks could reshape gender roles

• Why reducing economic inequality is key to reducing violence against women

• What egalitarian communities today can teach us about building a more equal future

Ghodsee also discusses hopeful alternatives — from cooperative communities to new ways of organizing economies around care, cooperation, and shared prosperity.

If you enjoy the episode, please like, share, comment, and leave us a review. Follow us on X @EQUALShope, Bluesky and on LinkedIn.

Kristen Ghodsee is the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and Everyday Utopia: What 2,500 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life.

This conversation is a part of Oxfam’s #PersonalToPowerful campaign. The campaign calls for our shared feminist future where gender justice starts with bodily autonomy. It echoes the stakes outlined in Oxfam’s Personal to Powerful briefing on gender justice, which shows how unequal economic systems, rising inequality, and anti‑rights movements are not just historical legacies but real threats to women’s rights.

As a part of the campaign, we invited feminist & queer activists this International Women’s Day (IWD) to share their letters from the future, a future where bodily autonomy reigns. Check out the Letters from the Future repository here. You can also submit your own ‘Letter from the future’ using this link.

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Here are some of the main takeaways!

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Inequality in Mexico…in numbers

Today, Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world. The richest 1% of the population (just 1.3 million people!) earn 35% of total income, hold 40% of the country’s private wealth, and are responsible for 23% of polluting emissions.

At the same time, 18.8 million people live without access to nutritious and quality food, 38.5 million live in social deprivation or below the poverty line, and 21 million women devote at least a full workday to unpaid care work.

Over the past 30 years, extreme wealth concentration in Mexico has consolidated. Mexico’s ultra-rich have never been as numerous or as rich as they are today. There are 22 billionaires with a combined fortune of 219 billion dollars, roughly equivalent to Qatar’s GDP.

Mexico confirms what Thomas Piketty argued in Capital in the Twenty-First Century: when the fortunes of the richest grow faster than the economy, economic inequality deepens. Between 1996 and 2025, Carlos Slim’s wealth increased more than eightfold, and billionaire wealth grew 4.2 times, while the Mexican economy did not even double in size. This model has been mediocre for the majority, but extraordinarily profitable for billionaires.

Recent experience shows that change is possible. Thanks to strong collective and democratic decisions by the government since 2017, the minimum wage has increased, which has made a big difference, although it is still far too low. Nevertheless, public investment as a share of GDP in 2024 was still less than half of what it was 45 years ago. Despite the growing concentration of wealth, the private sector invests less than $8 for every $100 dollars earned. Restoring public investment and democratically directing it toward the development of social and productive infrastructure are indispensable conditions for fair and redistributive growth. Economic democracy is not decreed: it is built.

The nine proposals included in the report seek to transform, repair, and redistribute so that the benefits of the Mexican economy cease to be controlled and concentrated by a few:

• Mobilize investment flows in a fair and democratic manner.

• Strengthen rights protection mechanisms.

• Expand the mandates of economic policy regulatory bodies.

• Showcase and address billionaire fiscal irresponsibility.

• Promote inclusive care policies through collective participation.

• Advance a new democratic governance of water as a human right.

• Develop social infrastructure for the redistribution of care.

• Reallocate the electricity subsidy so that it is progressive.

• Finance electric mass public transportation in a progressive manner.

In the current international context, Oxfam Mexico says, these policies mean diversifying trade and investment, reducing US dependence, prioritising the domestic market, and building the state capacities necessary to seize new growth opportunities.

Taking measures in response to concentrated economic power in Mexico is not a threat to development: it is the only way to consolidate the social advances achieved in recent years and expand them for the benefit of the majority.

Thank you to the Oxfam Mexico team for their brilliant data-driven analysis and evidence-based policy solutions.

Something to read and listen to

Read the report by Oxfam Mexico (only in Spanish for now, but English translation coming soon!)

Listen to Alexandra Haas, Oxfam Mexico’s executive director.

Chart of the week from KPMG showing how the share of the economy going to profits rather than wages has reached a post-WWII high.

Read this UNU Wider report about how global profit shifting contributes to cross-country inequalities.

I was staying at my mother’s house in Oxford recently and we went to the local public park with the kids. The park has an old stone house that now serves as the public library. Bury Knowle park and house were originally in private ownership. The house was built for a banker in 1800, and owned by a series of wealthy families, before being bought by the city council in 1930. It was turned into the park and library it still is today, as well as other uses such as being a baby clinic for young mothers.

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The UK has many such buildings and parks, formerly the large homes of rich people, now run for various government or public purposes- becoming libraries, hospitals, education colleges or various government training institutes. Many hundreds of other large houses and grounds are managed by the National Trust, which is an independent charity, and the public can pay to visit them. These properties are very popular, especially with the middle classes as the cost of entry remains a barrier. I love them, particularly the grounds, as they are generally beautiful landscapes with huge mature oak and other trees, an oasis from the industrial farmland that makes up most of our countryside. Great tea and cheese scones too.

A peaceful revolution

These houses and their transition from private ownership to public use are the very physical manifestation of an incredible reduction in wealth inequality that occurred during the 20^th century in the UK, where the share of wealth of the richest 1% fell from a peak of 72% to 18% in 1983.

In addition to many of these houses and their land being turned over to the public, many more were simply demolished, and the lands they controlled divided up. Over a thousand country houses were destroyed up and down the country.

Some of these houses were enormous, similar in size and stature to the fictional Downton Abbey, employing huge numbers of servants and other staff, all to support one family.

They were torn down, the many books in their libraries and their collections of art sold off, or given to the state in lieu of tax owed- today if you go around the National Gallery and look at the many amazing works of art, next to the name of the picture, you often see a short sentence saying, ‘donated to the nation by Lord X, in lieu of death duties’.

This radical shift was not the result of a violent revolution or insurrection, but the product of a peaceful, democratic transition that took the UK from being one of the most unequal countries in the world to being one of the most equal, on a par with Sweden. It is a story that is not well know at all and rarely told.

The reasons behind this dramatic destruction of privilege and great fortunes were multiple, the product of both deliberate policy and historical events, and the complex synergy between them. They have, I think, significant implications for today, where wealth is once again becoming far more concentrated in the UK and the rest of the world.

The purposeful destruction of extreme wealth

While peaceful and democratic, this shift did not happen without a fight. This was a dramatic battle between the newly enfranchised, newly organised and vocal working and middle classes, and the historically wealthy, many of whom could trace their wealth back to the Norman conquest of Britain.

The removal of trade protections on corn, and the competition from corn grown in the USA or Argentina, made farming less profitable, and not enough to support such palaces and the style of living that came with them.

Taxes on wealth, inheritance and incomes, played a huge role in this demolition of wealth. The ‘supertax’ introduced on the incomes of richest by the Prime Minister Lloyd George, who faced a huge battle to do it with the House of Lords. The estate tax, known also as ‘death duties’, which was introduced in 1894, reached a peak of 85% in the 1960’s.

The first World War saw many young men who were the heirs to fortunes killed on the battlefield, mown down by machine guns, leading their men over the top. It also saw many servants go to fight, and many houses temporarily requisitioned to become hospitals. Many did not come back either, over 720,000 were killed in WW1, around one in eight who fought. The emancipation of women, in part also driven by the war, but also the suffragette movement and the availability of better paid jobs that did not entail servitude, meant a collapse in the numbers willing to work as housemaids, parlour maids, ladies’ maids or cooks. Men too had better options than being stable hands, footmen or butlers, driving up the cost of having an army of servants.

Harder to quantify, but equally important, was a big shift in the public mood, that crystalised with Winston Churchill being ousted from government in July 1945, and the election of a labour government on a landslide.

Britons from across the political spectrum saw the old world as one that had led them into destitution, economic hardship and two world wars. They wanted a new, modern Britain, which would no longer tolerate such wealth inequality. The deference of the past was replaced by a new self-confidence that the future of Britain should be built by and for ordinary people, not the historically privileged elite.

Importantly, this reduction in wealth inequality was not simply the inevitable product of events. It was done with purpose, by politicians, acting on the will of the majority for a more equal country. Events such as war and stock market crashes of course contributed, but it was the policy responses to these events that mattered as much as the events themselves.

Even the richest were in many ways resigned to this new world. Whilst their wealth was much diminished, many remained extremely wealthy, and do so to this day. Often, they owned more than one of these houses, so were happy to see a few torn down or given away, content to keep their one country estate. The owners of Streatham House simply retreated to Glamis Castle in Scotland. This was not a complete revolution. Britain was left with a significant number of rich people who still owned one in every five pounds of national wealth.

High time we remembered how we made a more equal Britain

It is something we have all forgotten really. As people make their way into the library in Bury Knowle House to return a borrowed book to the desk situated in the former ballroom, little do they know about the quiet revolution to which they owe this opportunity.

Having reduced dramatically, wealth inequality is on the rise again. Old houses used by the government are in some cases being sold back to new rich owners, who often immediately close them to the public, making them once again private palaces only accessible to the richest.

Our current government in the UK, despite huge public support, remains far too timid to enact a wealth tax. They have increased the inheritance tax at least. Yet they have done not nearly enough to tackle the huge problem of wealth concentration, and with it the huge rise in inheritance, which is driving inequality across the country. UK millennials have much higher wealth inequality than previous generations, and our society is once again becoming one where your economic standing depends on your parents’ wealth, and not on your own endeavour.

High time I think to do more to tell the story of how we took on extreme wealth and won, and built a far fairer, more equal nation. If we did it before, we can do it again.

ENDS

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Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also a visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.

Listen to our latest podcast episode ‘How Migrants Are Used as Scapegoats for the Real Crisis’

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In this episode, we unpack how migrants are often turned into political scapegoats to redirect public anger away from the real causes of public frustration —rising inequality, underfunded public services, unemployment, and the soaring cost of living.

Migration policy expert Zoe Gardner brings a UK lens, showing how media narratives and political talking points can manufacture outrage that shields those at the top.

Sharon Ekambaram joins from South Africa, where xenophobia, inequality, and coordinated disinformation campaigns reveal the same pattern playing out in a different setting.

Different continents. Same playbook.

Together, they expose how anti-migrant rhetoric gains ground when inequality deepens and why that’s rarely a coincidence. We dig into who benefits from these narratives, how social media supercharges them, and why public attitudes are often far more humane than political messaging suggests.

This is a sharp, myth-busting discussion about power, inequality, and who really benefits when societies are encouraged to blame outsiders instead of confronting systemic injustice.

If you enjoy the episode, please like, share, comment, and leave us a review. Follow us on X @EQUALShope, Bluesky and on LinkedIn.

Complete complacency on the part of creditors is letting the problem fester, rather than acting now to tackle this crisis. That means more austerity for the populations of low-income countries, more people going hungry, more suffering for the sick, more care work for women, blighted futures for youths… and higher bills for creditor countries’ taxpayers when debt crises eventually flare up.

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Debt in numbers

5.2 billion people live in countries where debt payments are higher than total social spending. The World Bank rates over half of low-income countries as “at high risk of debt distress” or “in debt distress”. The Sustainable Development Goals – UN targets to eradicate extreme poverty and reduce inequality – have become out of reach.

Climate finance hits a wall. While there are efforts underway to reform multilateral development banks in order to expand their lending capacity, too little attention is paid to borrowing capacity. At least 47 out of 66 low-income countries would need to take on too much external debt within five years to meet global climate and development goals. Climate finance should take the form of grants, not loans.

Meanwhile, rich creditors are doing fine, thank you very much. Rich private creditors earn a risk premium when they buy low-income countries’ sovereign debt. It is so high that they tend to make a profit even in the few cases of defaults. Debt Justice-UK estimates that rich bondholders of six countries that recently restructured their debt made an average profit of 38% (over the entire duration of their investment) despite the “haircuts” they conceded.

The G20’s debt relief offer is half-hearted. In the midst of the pandemic, the G20 postponed low-income countries’ debt payments, which was a good thing. It then created a permanent mechanism to forgive their unsustainable sovereign debt: the so-called Common Framework. This is completely failing to deliver.

Only four countries have applied for debt relief under the Common Framework. There are a range of reasons why overindebted governments fail to raise their hands to get relief:

• Too little: The Common Framework is too stingy. After a country falls off the debt cliff, the Common Framework offers just enough relief to put it back right at the edge of the cliff, not at a safe distance. Zambia did get relief… only to remain “at high risk of debt distress”. The current review of the World Bank and IMF’s Debt Sustainability Framework is an opportunity to right that wrong.

• Too slow: It took four years of excruciating negotiations for Zambia to get that relief – and it’s still negotiating with some marginal creditors. The Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable – an informal global governance body advising the G20 – has made progress to streamline and speed up debt restructuring processes. But creditors are responding with ever more complex debt contracts that are likely to complicate future debt restructurings.

• Too risky: There is no equivalent to corporate bankruptcy law for sovereign debt. When a government fails to pay its creditors, the latter can sue in London or New York court (where contracts are usually signed) and almost certainly win. That shuts off debtor governments from global financial markets. The prospect of such lawsuits gives creditors huge leverage in negotiations with governments.

• Too late: Debtor countries’ Finance Ministers tend to kick the can down the road and let their successors bite the bullet of debt restructuring, as they fear the credit rating downgrade (even though their low ratings already price them out of the market anyway) and perceive default as shameful.

Twenty years ago, after a decade of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, creditor countries made a debt relief offer that debtor countries could not refuse: cancelling over $100 billion of debt. It is time to repeat that feat, otherwise the debt problem will continue to fester and stunt the fight against inequality and climate change.

This time, however, it will be important to complement debt cancellation with the creation of a legal framework for sovereign debt in order to stop the cycle of debt crises.

Something to read and listen to

Read this report by Matthew Martin and David Waddock about resolving the debt crisis.

Listen to Matthew on this week’s Equals Podcast

and read his blog

My pro-apartheid grandfather then forced us to return to South Africa in the worst days of apartheid, when black children were forced to live with their grandparents in the “homelands” (the least fertile bits of desolate land), and only blacks of working age were allowed anywhere near the whites. But a woman who worked in our block of flats had smuggled her son who was same age as me (eight) into the building, and we used to play together. One day, a gang of white teenage thugs decided it would be fun to throw bricks and rocks at us, and try to stone us to death. Thank God my aunt showed up and stopped the police arresting – not the thugs, but my friend for being in white area!

When I came back to Britain, I also saw institutionalised inequality. My mother had to travel round the country for work and enrolled me briefly in a private school before I went to a government school. I saw how the “school apartheid” in the UK which continues to this day. Wealthier children who are no brighter than poorer ones still get most of the highest-paying and most powerful jobs, perpetuating inequality through the generations.

At university, I realised that debt injustice was wrecking the lives of billions of people. My PhD became a book called The Crumbling Façade of Africa’s Debt Negotiations: Chaos, Arrogance and Secrecy. It traced how because creditors held 100% of power in secret debt negotiations, they decided the amount of debt relief based on the position of the most recalcitrant creditor, leading to a chaotic system where countries came back repeatedly for relief, while cutting spending on the things their people really needed – education, food, health and water.

I realised that debt was inextricably linked with poverty and inequality. Some borrowing was essential – helping to fund all the things citizens want and need; but when countries ran out of money to pay it back, they faced a debt crisis and ordinary citizens paid the price. The creditors (external or domestic) are nearly all rich, dominated by financial institutions and people making money out of wealth they hold in financial investments. On the other hand, those who pay the biggest price in a debt crisis are poor and middle-class citizens who see “austerity” - spending cuts in education, health, social protection, and public sector wages; and tax increases - to repay the debt. When there is a debt crisis, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

In the 1990s/2000s, I was at the centre of the fight for debt relief, advising the Jubilee debt cancellation movement and helping global South countries (the group known patronisingly as Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) to fight their case to negotiate maximum debt relief. We achieved a huge amount – including getting creditors to bring debt payments down to 10% of budgets. This allowed countries to double or treble social spending – providing free primary education to all children and saving millions of lives. In countries like Rwanda, governments invested in rural roads and small markets to create sustainable livelihoods for the poor. These efforts set up those countries for a decade of strong growth and poverty reduction.

How did we do it ? By combining a massive popular Jubilee campaign movement, analysis coming up with workable and affordable solutions. and tough lobbying by the beneficiary countries (evaluators later said they achieved US$27 billion of the US$100 billion cancelled).

Lots of people object to debt relief on the grounds that the countries are corrupt. It is true that corruption by lenders and borrowers is frequent – I and many others have been threatened with violence by the crooks when we have investigated them. To stop it we need strong laws at both ends. The UK anti-corruption law of 2010 was used by Mozambique in 2025 to help spare its citizens from having to pay US$2 billion of crooked loans, and many other countries need to strengthen their laws to cover debt contracts. Also vital is transparency and accountability to citizens and parliaments of the global South, not just by publishing data and contracts online, but through national accountability processes supported by capacity-building for parliaments and citizens to stop bad deals, and for government officials to produce the analysis citizens need. Last time, to ensure the proceeds of debt relief were spent, there was a revolution in accountability: countries designed their own Poverty Reduction Strategies, with strong citizen participation, and then committees of government, civil society and development partners oversaw the spending: that’s why the debt relief achieved so much development progress.

On the other hand, the big thing we didn’t achieve was to change the system. The creditors remained in charge, and decided by 2010 to abolish almost all the advances of the 2000s, and go back to decisions based on financial not development criteria. When in around 2015 creditors began to cut grant aid, and push countries to borrow in financial markets, just when the world had set new development goals which required trillions of dollars of financing, I could see that we were heading for a new debt crisis: and now we are in the worst crisis in history.

Why is it the worst crisis ever ? With the HIPCs, many of them had been in arrears for many years and so weren’t paying much debt service (except to the IMF and World Bank). But now almost all countries in the global South have astronomical debt payments. At Development Finance International we have built a Debt Service Watch database, the only one which compares external and domestic debt service with core social spending for 2025-26. It shows that on average countries of the global South are paying 35% of their budgets on debt.

As you can see from the map below, in almost all countries, debt payments are higher than education spending. Overall, 5.2 billion people live in countries where debt payments are higher than total social spending. On average, debt service is 3 times education spending, 5 times health spending and 9 times social protection spending. And in almost all of these countries, the high debt payment burdens go on for the next decade.

As a result, increasing numbers of governments - and especially citizens - are shouting much louder about the need for debt cancellation. They are angry because since COVID-19, their governments have been cutting social spending and increasing taxes even faster to make rapidly rising debt payments. We have seen this clearly in the 2024 Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index which we produce with Oxfam, where many governments rolled back anti-inequality policies in 2022-24 (though some countries continue to fight inequality well).

In addition, citizens are basing the demand for debt cancellation on new arguments such as reparations, decolonisation and paying for climate and nature justice (on average debt payments are 98 times higher than what governments are spending on climate !).

On the other hand, two things haven’t changed since the first crisis -though they are often used as excuses by the creditor community to say they make debt relief much harder.

1. Commercial creditors are more prominent. Banks have mostly been replaced by bondholders and investment funds. Both in their day have acted like the Wild West in terms of overcharging countries. Last time it took “moral suasion”, tax incentives and strong laws to get most creditors to participate in relief. Once again a minority are refusing to provide relief and launching lawsuits against countries (most recently Ethiopia). One of the things I am most proud of is helping in 2010 to design the UK “anti-vulture fund” law which forced recalcitrant creditors to participate. We urgently need an update of that law.

2. China is more prominent. China has been lending since the 1970s, and at the forefront of debt relief since 1977, providing as much or more than Western countries. It always wants to use its own processes, and not be corralled into action by the G7 or G20. Its lending shot up and became more expensive in the 2010s, and now it wants to be sure that Western commercial creditors and multilateral institutions will deliver their fair share of relief.

What can we do to end the crisis ? It is easy to design solutions which can achieve massive relief at relatively low cost. We need to focus on cancelling or cutting payments due in the next decade (rather than cancelling all the debt which would cost far more), to free up space for governments to spend money on the SDGs. Countries fall into three groups:

1. 40 lower-income countries need major service reduction, bringing down their payments from 35% of spending to 10% over the next 10 years (the HIPC target). As they don’t routinely borrow commercially, this would not negatively affect their “market access”.

2. 25 are regularly hit by natural disasters (earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemics). They need us to move beyond “pausing” their debt payments for a few years which just worsens the problem, to reducing debt payments for 5 years to allow them to recover.

3. 35 (mostly wealthier) countries, like South Africa, constantly borrow on financial markets to fund their budgets: they need comprehensive measures to reduce their borrowing costs.

To spend the proceeds, countries should build Just Green Transition Strategies to fight extreme inequality, climate crisis and nature loss at the same time – and participatory structures to hold them accountable for implementation. If we fund these with debt cancellation (and new money), we can make massive progress on the SDGs and the post-2030 agenda. But none of this is happening now because world leaders aren’t prioritising this crisis. To get them to focus on ending extreme inequality and poverty, and confront the climate and nature crises, a global popular movement is rapidly growing across the world – please join it now!

END.

Author: Matthew Martin, Executive Director, Development Finance International

Matthew discusses these issues in more depth in our latest podcast episode, unpacking how debt, inequality, and political choice intersect — and why things don’t have to stay this way. Listen here👇

EQUALS

Who Pays When Countries Fall into Debt?

When countries fall into debt, who actually pays the price…

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3 months ago · Equals Bulletin

In this episode, we talk to Matthew Martin, a passionate advocate for debt relief and against inequality, who shares his personal journey from experiencing apartheid in South Africa to becoming a leading voice in the fight against global debt crises. Matthew discusses the intricate relationship between debt and inequality, highlighting how high debt burdens disproportionately affect poorer citizens and drive cuts in social spending.

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Right now, 5.2 billion people live in countries that spend more money paying back debt than they do on schools, hospitals, or climate action. We break down how that happens, why global financial markets get away with charging eye-watering interest rates, and why governments are so often pushed to cut public services instead of standing up to creditors.

He reflects on the success of the Jubilee debt cancellation campaign and the lessons learned, emphasizing the need for structural change in the global financial system to prevent future crises. With insights into the current state of debt across the globe, Matthew calls for a renewed popular movement to prioritize debt relief and tackle inequality.

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If you enjoy the episode, please like, share, comment, and leave us a review. Follow us on X @EQUALShope, Bluesky and on LinkedIn.

Matthew also explores these issues in more depth in a companion blog, unpacking how debt repayments are reshaping public budgets and deepening inequality worldwide. Read it here 👇

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The Adam Smith Institute, a right-wing think-tank set up in his honour, is our nemesis every year when we release Oxfam’s Davos report on inequality. I have been in lots of debates with their representatives over the years, where they question the importance of worrying about inequality, and especially taxation, and instead explain that the answer is simply more free markets.

Interestingly this was not all Adam Smith said though. He is very selectively quoted. Unlike many modern economists who prefer theoretical mathematical models that abstract from reality, Smith was an empiricist, observing not just the UK economy (which at that time was very similar in shape to many countries in the Global South today) but also other countries all over the world. He made use of what concrete data he could get to help support his theories.

Class warrior Smith

In doing so, he was one of the first economists to theorise the idea of social classes to help understand the economy, dividing society into workers, landlords and capitalists. He also had a very low opinion of rich people, seeing them either lazy or indolent, living off the rents from their land, or as monopolistic, rapacious capitalists.

He was the first economist too to introduce the idea that the prosperity of a nation should be measured on how well the working majority are doing, and whether their lives are becoming measurably better, rather than only measuring the opulence of the richest.

Because of this I actually think he would have liked Oxfam’s Davos paper this year, Resisting the Rule of the Rich, which is about the dangers of economic power turning into political power, and the suppression of liberty and freedom for the many to protect the wealth of the few. He was deeply concerned about the influence of rich capitalists over politics and government policy, and he felt that if they were allowed to pursue their self-interest in this way this would run contrary to the common interest. That this would in fact be a very visible hand, and would instead lead to increasing monopoly power.

Anti-colonial Smith

This led him to be very negative about colonialism. He was opposed to the companies like the East India company that used their monopoly power to colonise and oppress other countries and reap huge profits, so he would probably have liked our Davos paper last year on colonialism too.

He was not a fan of big government either. He felt that governments were a very poor substitute for the free market. Branko Milanovic (whose brilliant book, Visions of Inequality inspired this blog) reckons Smith’s state would represent about 10% of GDP, whereas modern welfare states are more like 40% of GDP. There we would definitely disagree. I think that modern, accountable welfare states, using progressive taxation to provide universal free healthcare or education, and protecting the young, the old and those who are struggling, are one of the greatest thing humans have ever invented.

Smith believed that competition was the best way of regulating capitalists, and not government, as government can be captured by the rich and powerful – something he saw all the time. Politicians can be captured by wealth and money; that is as true today as it was in the 18^th century. His answer to this though was to keep government as small as possible. The trouble is I think that regulation of the market by a small government is likely to be very weak as they have very limited economic power to face up to rich capitalists. This surely leaves the capitalists free to conspire and form monopolies even more. For me, modern, accountable states that answer to the people and not to organised money are the best way to counterbalance the power of capital; rather than shrinking a state that is captured, we should be capturing it back.

Anyhow, given the focus of our Davos paper this year on civil and political freedoms and inequality, I began to wonder what kind of a foreword Adam Smith might have written for the paper, and I have assembled the following from his writing:

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.

As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. [yes Smith, and not Karl Marx wrote this!]

What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable… If [justice] is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society, that fabric which to raise and support seems in this world if I may say so has the peculiar and darling care of Nature, must in a moment crumble into atoms.

The mean rapacity [of]… merchants and manufacturers ... [shows that they] neither are nor ought to be the rulers of mankind. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [of people], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

In the courts of princes, in the drawing-rooms of the great, where success depends not upon merit but upon favour, truth is seldom heard. This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful… is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. [I can’t think of a better description of Davos.]

One feels we must all combine to resist the rule of the rich in our society.’

[Ok I wrote the last sentence, but the rest is direct quotes I promise]

ENDS

Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also a visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.

2025 has been a year of resistance: the people versus the powerful. Life has become unbearably difficult for ordinary citizens and now - from Nairobi to Bangladesh, Italy to Peru - workers of the world are downing their tools and demanding better, rejecting a global economic order that treats their suffering as necessary for profit.

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Growing up in Mathare, one of Nairobi’s biggest slums, I know first-hand the violence of poverty, the preventable loss of lives lived hand to mouth, the indignity of hungry babies one cannot feed, rent one cannot pay, healthcare and education one cannot afford. Poverty is not a natural condition. It is engineered, maintained and ingrained by systems and governments that decide who thrives and who struggles. These are not accidents of fate, but political choices.

For instance, in Kenya we once had free primary education – now we do in name only, with a multitude of ways in which parents must actually pay. This retreat from education, health and social protection is not incompetence, it is deliberate austerity imposed on the poor while the wealthy continue to extract with impunity. Ordinary people are heavily taxed despite an already unbearable cost of living. Meanwhile, corporations receive exemptions and political elites shield their wealth. This became fertile ground for the Reject the Finance Bill protests of 2024 and 2025. We marched with fire in our bellies and radical hope in our voices. Hope that the future must be better. We are not asking for anything grandiose, we simply want to live in dignity. The state responded with violence and many lost their lives. We have seen this brutality repeated in Cameroon, Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, Peru, and Tanzania. All are reminders of what can happen when the elite feel threatened.

As the liberation leader Amílcar Cabral reminded us, people do not fight for abstract ideas. They fight to change their material conditions, to secure their children’s future, to live better and in peace. Yet today that future feels uncertain. Young people are delaying families because they cannot sustain themselves. Climate change and ecological collapse remind us daily that even the earth is pleading for an end to exploitation.

Still, I hold a deep belief that there is enough for everybody, enough land, enough water, enough joy, enough love, if we put solidarity, unity and humanity at the core of our politics. There is no scarcity, only hoarding and systems designed to keep abundance in the hands of a few.

The Gen Z protests have revealed the interconnectedness of all our struggles, from the economic protests of Nairobi to post-election protests in Maputo, from the barrios of Latin America to the townships of South Africa, I learned this as a grassroots activist at the Mathare Social Justice Centre. People’s struggles are always struggles for dignity and social justice. These must be the priorities of any government that claims to serve its people. A democracy that cannot feed, house, or protect its people is democracy in name only.

We cannot wish poverty away, it must be systemically eradicated, just as it has been systemically entrenched. This requires courage to confront capitalism, colonial legacies and the political elite. This change is not only necessary, it is inevitable. That world is calling us now, and we must answer.

END.

Author: Wanjira Wanjiru, Kenyan grassroots activist who co-founded the Mathare Social Justice Centre and won the Mawina Kouyate Daughters of Africa Award for activism

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This year’s report, Resisting the Rule of the Rich, once again lays bare something the public has known for a long time: the problem is not lack of information, but the deafening silence that surrounds the obvious.

Billionaire wealth has grown at three times the pace of the previous five years, reaching $18.3 trillion. Just over 3,000 billionaires own wealth equivalent to six times the combined GDP of Africa – a continent home to more than 1.5 billion people. At the same time, one in four people globally faces hunger. But the core message of the report is not about billionaires’ wealth or hunger. It’s about power – who holds it, how they use it, and what it costs the rest of us.

Common sense understands power. It always has.

The Normalisation of Oligarchy

Most people already know that extreme wealth tilts the playing field. They see how money buys influence, sets political agendas, shapes media narratives, and insulates the richest from accountability. Oxfam’s report states plainly that billionaire power now actively dismantles progressive policies and erodes civic and political rights – and that this is happening across the world, not in isolation.

For years we have been told that questioning concentrated wealth is divisive – and those who dared to question it were labelled. But common sense knows better: no democracy can function when the rules are shaped by those who can afford to rewrite them, or when those same rules apply differently depending on the size of one’s purse.

The Climate of Power

Resisting the Rule of the Rich also highlights how extreme wealth drives extreme damage – not just economically or politically, but environmentally. Drawing on Oxfam’s climate inequality report, Climate Plunder, it shows that the richest 0.1% produce more carbon in a single day than the poorest half of humanity emits in an entire year. Meanwhile, ordinary people – especially those least responsible for the crisis – have already reduced their emissions, while Europe’s richest 0.1% have increased theirs.

This is not a side‑issue. It is part of the same pattern: a global order where excessive wealth buys the right to decide who bears the burden.

Why Common Sense Matters

For too long, inequality has been treated as a technical problem – a matter of tinkering, modelling, and marginal gains. But today’s inequality is not technical. It is structural – a system deliberately rigged in favour of the powerful.

That’s why I keep returning to common sense.

Because common sense refuses to be intimidated by complexity. It recognises that hunger in a world of abundance is not a puzzle. That democracy distorted by wealth is not an accident. That a planet destabilised by the lifestyles of the few is not a mystery to decode.

Common sense tells the truth plainly: A world organised for the rich will never work for the rest of us.

And perhaps that is why it has been pushed out of the room for so long.

But the truth is this: people have never stopped holding onto it. And now, they are beginning to say it out loud again – clearly, calmly, without apology.

Common Sense Won’t Stay Silent!

That, more than any summit or speech, is what gives me hope.

Author: Deepak Xavier is the Head of Inequality, Economic & Climate Justice at Oxfam International and Global Convenor, Fight Inequality Alliance.

The world is not approaching a crucial tipping point: we are in it.

For many years, Amnesty International has warned of authoritarianism growing across and within countries. Evidence from the last year shows how this process is accelerating, and fast. One year on from the inauguration of President Trump, we have seen around the globe how leadership that prioritises military investment and foreign policy deal-making and rejects human rights protections and multilateral commitments is multiplying, and this has done dangerous damage to the hard-won equality, justice and dignity gains of these past 80 years the world over.

Equally for many years Oxfam has drawn our attention to the growing inequality emergency, with the relentless rise of the super-rich. As this report shows, this process too has accelerated; over the last year billionaire fortunes have risen three times faster than they have in the five years since 2020. The first trillionaire is on the horizon. Meanwhile one in four people are regularly worried about not having enough food to eat, having to skip meals to get by, and ordinary people’s lives are becoming impossible to afford.

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Authorities in a broad sweep of countries have employed authoritarian practices and introduced new measures to restrict freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly. They have used these, and existing laws and regulations, to clamp down on human rights defenders, critics and opponents, or as a way to evade accountability and defend the economically powerful.

In an all too familiar tale, the brunt of this repression is born by those with the least buffer, with union organisers, environmental defenders, women, racialised, indigenous and LGBTQI+ people around the world being forcibly disappeared, arbitrarily detained or killed for their activism.

As this report clearly shows, these two deeply concerning trends of growing authoritarianism and rising inequality are not separate problems. They are not distinct dilemmas. They instead deeply entwined, as governments across the world side with the powerful, not the people, and choose repression, not redistribution.

It is imperative that our hard won-civil and political rights – freedom of assembly, freedom of expression and freedom to organise – are protected. Protest is a cornerstone of fair and democratic societies, it is a critical bastion against authoritarianism. It is equally important that the social and economic rights of all are fulfilled; rights essential for living a life with dignity, covering basic needs like food, water, housing, healthcare, education.

It is view, confirmed by the facts, that central to the realisation of all these human rights must be a rapid reduction in inequality; the gap between the super-rich and the rest of society must be closed, and fast.

The good news is people around the world are not sitting idly by as billionaires and authoritarians corrode the foundations of our freedoms. Inequality and tax justice advocates are demanding action on inequality, and specifically on the taxation of the super-rich. A UN tax convention is on its way to becoming a reality, led by Africa. From Malaysia to Madagascar, Nepal to France and the US – people are leading the way with - less a wave - and more a tsunami of global protests confronting the rise of the far-right, calling for a change to corrupt governments, who prioritise profit over people and facilitate the dominantion of the super-wealthy over the lives and liberties of everyday people.

Resisting the Rule of the Rich from Oxfam is a fearless and timely reminder of what is at stake, what is already lost and what is left to protect from the insatiable grasping hands of the billionaire class. Oxfam reminds us all that a new and more equal world is possible. It is time to organise, mobilise – and take it.

END.

Author: Agnès Callamard is the Secretary General of Amnesty International.