It’s Time to Invoke Common Sense Against Inequality

By Deepak Xavier

Every January, as the world’s elite and most powerful gather in Davos, something predictable happens. Leaders lament inequality, make gestures toward cooperation, and assure us that renewal is on the horizon. And every January, Oxfam releases its inequality report – not to shock the world, but to remind everyone what they already know.

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.

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