GLOBAL INEQUALITY REACHES OBSCENE HEIGHTS

The 2026 World Inequality Report offers a damning indictment of the extreme concentration of wealth and power worldwide. Among the most outrageous figures: 10% of the world's population owns 75% of the wealth, vs just 2% owned by the bottom 50%. In fIn fact, the top 0.001% alone accounts for three times as many people as half the world's population combined. The same 10% is responsible for 77% of world carbon emissions, compared to just 3% for the bottom half, who will suffer the most from runaway global heating.

Accounting for unpaid domestic labour, women on average earn just 32% per hour as men. The world's wealthiest region spends 30 times as much per capita on education and healthcare as its poorest. And that yawning chasm is only growing.

Marxists have long had the analytical tools to understand how such grotesque inequality came to be. Yet the language of unequal exchange -- even the basic vocabulary of capitalism and imperialism -- is nowhere to be found in the World Inequality Report's hundreds of pages. Instead, all it offers is vague prescriptions for progressive taxation and "accountability" for corporate actors.

That's because the report quite literally owes itself to those same corporations' philanthropic, reputation-laundering largesse. It may usefully synthesise, in hard data, the glaringly obvious evidence we already have for the world's appalling inequities. But it can never serve as a roadmap for truly ending them.