The World’s 85 Richest People Have as Much Money as the World’s Poorest 3.5 Billion

You could read that headline every day for the rest of your life, and it’d probably never fully sink in. Here are some truly staggering numbers from Oxfam, who today released a study on the world’s income disparity that is absolutely eye-popping. Just a run down of the bullet points is incredible. Nearly 50 percent of the world’s wealth is owned by one percent of the world’s population. The richest one percent of people in the world are worth about $110 trillion—65 times the sum total of wealth owned by the world’s poorest fifty percent. 7 in 10 people live in countries where income equality has decreased over the past thirty years. And, perhaps the most jaw-dropping stat of all, the fact that the total wealth of the world’s poorest 3.5 billion equals the wealth of the richest 85 individuals. That means the entire wealth of the poorest half of the world equals the wealth of about the same number of people you could cram into a hotel pool …