Editorials & Other Articles

Sen. Bernie Sanders has made a habit of citing stunning stats about inequality, but too often the numbers oversimplify complex economics. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

“There is no moral or economic justification for the six wealthiest people in the world having as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population, 3.7 billion people.”

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), remarks during a speech at Westminster College, Sept. 21, 2017

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We cut Sanders some slack earlier when he made an inequality comparison within the United States. But wealth is a fundamentally misleading measure if you’re comparing countries across the globe. It’s one thing to look at inequality inside a country, but international comparisons are in another realm and fraught with even more problems.

Without considering how debt is measured and held, what kinds of assets each group owns, or how the currencies are converted, it’s hard to make heads or tails of what wealth actually means, with respect to people’s daily lives around the globe. Moreover, negative wealth — which includes people with high standards of living — really drags down the bottom 50 percent. Sanders’s statistic, while provocative, is basically meaningless. He earns Three Pinocchios.