The neoliberal revolution had a simple and, to some at least, intuitively attractive premise. By slashing taxes, removing regulations, and eliminating global barriers to the flow of capital, new wealth would be created, and a majority would share in the benefits. Free to spend and invest without the cumbersome burdens imposed by many states in the decades after World War II, individuals and businesses alike would in turn become more creative and more prosperous as entrepreneurship and rational self-interest replaced the clumsy and often arbitrary schemes of government bureaucrats.

Measured against this story, it might be said that the neoliberal project has utterly failed. Every year, on the opening day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, international NGO Oxfam publishes updated findings on the state of global inequality — and every year, its basic conclusions are the same. Almost without fail, the world’s richest people have gotten richer, newly created wealth has failed to trickle down, and the total share of all wealth held by an infinitesimal sliver at the top is so vast it dwarfs that collectively held by billions of human beings at the bottom.

This year’s report, Survival of the Richest, is a particularly striking case in point. Not only do the richest 1 percent hold 45.6 percent of all global wealth, but the poorest half of the world holds just 0.75 percent. As the world population surpasses eight billion people, fewer than one hundred billionaires have more wealth than the four billion poorest people combined. And as inflation outpaces the wages of 1.7 billion workers worldwide, the world’s billionaires are seeing their fortunes increase by $2.7 billion every single day. The gap, moreover, continues to widen, with the top 1 percent capturing nearly two-thirds of all new wealth created since 2020 — nearly twice as much as the other 99 percent of the global population.