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A 100 years ago, a judge of the United States Supreme Court Louis Brandeis had with remarkable prescience declared, “We must make our choice. Either we can have extreme wealth in the hands of the few, or we can have democracy. We cannot have both.”

In a stirring, deeply worrying report titled Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom From Billionaire Power, Oxfam describes how governments worldwide are “making the wrong choice; choosing to defend wealth not freedom”. They are choosing “the rule of the rich”. This also entails the choice “to repress their people’s anger at how life is becoming unaffordable and unbearable, rather than redistributing wealth from the richest to the rest”. 

The report also documents the convergence of the super-rich with political power the world over. This enables them “to shape and influence politics, societies and economies”. In sharp contrast, “those economically with the least wealth are becoming politically poor, their voices silenced in the face of growing authoritarianism and the suppression of hard-won rights and freedoms”. 

There could be few lessons more worthy of attention for our times than these. 

In this world of super-wealth and endemic poverty, just 12 billionaires own as much wealth as half the world’s people, some four billion women, men and children.

Decades of neo-liberal policies and the slashing of social welfare policies have been central to the making of this staggeringly unequal world. Inequality has burgeoned through these decades, but more specifically the five years leading up to 2025 have been a watershed.

Just in 2025, the wealth of billionaires grew three times faster than the average annual rate in the previous five years. The number of billionaires around the world crossed 3,000 for the first time, and the amount of billionaire wealth is higher than at any time in history. 

At the same time, since 2020, the reduction in poverty globally has mostly halted. In other words, in a world in which nearly half the world’s people are forced to live in poverty, the poor have tended to remain impoverished.

Also read: Inequality Is a Political Choice. A New Wealth Tracker Shows How India Could Do Better.

Food costs have risen dizzyingly around the world, raising the cost of living intolerably. Those who are socially stigmatised and women are most likely to be trapped in low-end low-paid insecure employment. One in four people live with hunger and food insecurity. Their numbers have actually increased over the past five years by over 40%. 

The global G20 alliance, at the time when the presidency vested with South Africa, appointed an Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality headed by Joseph Stiglitz. This Committee on Global Inequality found that wealth gaps have widened sharply over the past 25 years, with 90% of the world’s population living in societies shaped by high economic inequality.

It also noted that a quarter of humanity – about 2.3 billion people – now face moderate or severe food insecurity. The number of persons living with or at the edge of hunger has risen sharply from 335 million in 2019 to 2.3 billion in 2025. 

Inequality is inimical to democracy, progress and fairness

A highly instructive finding of the Oxfam 2026 report is the great incompatibility of high inequality with democracy. It observes that highly unequal countries are up to seven times more likely to experience democratic erosion than more equal countries. The forms of democratic erosion in unequal countries that the report identifies include weakening the independence of the judiciary or the power of the legislature; the restriction of civil liberties and freedoms; the manipulation of elections; and growing concentration of power in the hands of authoritarian leaders. 

Closely linked to this democratic downslide is the ever-growing proximity and overlap of economic wealth and political power. Oxfam finds that the super-rich amplify their political power in three main ways. 

One of these is by directly accessing political office and institutions. It reports that over 11% of the world’s billionaires have held or sought political office. It is not just that billionaires are over 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people. 2025 saw a billionaire become the president of the world’s most powerful nation, with a cabinet that includes multiple billionaires.

In just his first year since his re-election, the wealth of US billionaires have skyrocketed higher than ever before, and even billionaires in other parts of the world have seen double-digit increases in their wealth. The policies of the Trump presidency that helped raise billionaire wealth so dramatically include the championing of deregulation and undermining agreements to increase corporate taxation. 

A second way that the ultra-rich expand their political influence is by “buying politics”. The super-rich, the report says, have long........

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