To great fanfare, Oxfam has again launched its annual report on wealth and inequality. This year, as with past editions, the report is replete with hyperbole, melodrama, and moralising. It doesn’t even pretend to be objective, but makes grandiose and often dubious claims such as ‘The global inequality crisis is reaching new extremes,’ and ‘The richest 1 per cent now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined,’ and ‘Power and privilege is being used to skew the economic system to increase the gap between the richest and the rest,’ and ‘The fight against poverty will not be...