Santosh Kumar Mohapatra
The latest annual report of Oxfam, released alongside the World Economic Forum at Davos, presents a disturbing portrait of the contemporary global order. It documents not merely an extraordinary concentration of wealth at the top, but a growing fusion of economic might with political influence and control over public discourse. The message is unmistakable: inequality today is no longer only an economic imbalance; it has become a profound democratic crisis. According to Oxfam, global billionaire wealth soared to $18.3 trillion in 2025, marking a 16% increase in just one year and an 81% rise since 2020. For the first time in history, the number of billionaires worldwide has crossed 3,000.
Oxfam describes this as “a good decade for billionaires.” Yet, in stark contrast, global poverty levels remain broadly where they stood in 2019 before the pandemic. The immense wealth generated at the top has not translated into meaningful gains for the majority. The divergence is staggering. While billionaire fortunes expanded by $2.5 trillion in a single year—an amount nearly equal to the total wealth owned by the poorest 4.1 billion people, or half of humanity—one in four people globally struggles to secure regular meals. More alarming than the scale of wealth inequality is its conversion into political and social power.
Billionaires are estimated to be 4,000 times more likely than ordinary citizens to hold political office. Even when they do not directly occupy elected positions, their policy influence is substantial—exerted through lobbying, campaign financing, media ownership and the revolving door between corporate leadership and government. Policy trends across countries reinforce this pattern. Governments have frequently enacted tax cuts for high earners, diluted corporate taxation, weakened anti-monopoly regulations and curtailed public spending on essential services.
The United States offers a prominent example, where recent tax measures have disproportionately benefited the wealthiest segments, even as a significant portion of citizens struggle to maintain a basic standard of living. The rise of AI and digital platforms has accelerated wealth concentration further. Skyrocketing valuations of technology and AI-driven firms have disproportionately enriched those already at the summit of the economic hierarchy.
Simultaneously, these technologies are reshaping labour markets in ways that often produce wage stagnation, informalisation and job insecurity. Once again, rewards are privatised, while risks are borne collectively. The social consequences of inequality are visible. Oxfam notes that 142 major anti-government protests occurred across 68 countries in the past year alone, many triggered by rising living costs, shrinking access to public services and deepening economic insecurity. Rather than addressing structural inequities, governments have often responded with repression—restricting civil liberties, limiting the right to protest and criminalising dissent. Economic deprivation breeds hardship; political exclusion breeds anger. Highly unequal societies are inherently more vulnerable to democratic backsliding. Concentrated wealth bends institutions, laws and norms to serve its interests. Electoral politics becomes increasingly expensive, policymaking opaque and accountability diluted.
Inequality is the result of deliberate policy choices—choices concerning taxation, labour protections, public investment and regulation. Governments possess the tools to reverse course, provided the political will exists. The report calls for national inequality-reduction strategies, progressive taxation of extreme wealth, strict firewalls between money and politics, and robust regulation of lobbying and campaign finance. It also stresses the protection of free expression and civil liberties as essential to democratic renewal. Oxfam further warns that reductions in international aid by wealthy nations could result in millions of preventable deaths by 2030, deepening global injustice. The central conclusion is clear.
Unchecked billionaire power poses a grave threat to democracy, social cohesion and human dignity. Inequality on this scale is not merely inefficient or unjust—it is fundamentally incompatible with genuine democracy. If democracy is to endure, power must be reclaimed from concentrated wealth and restored to the people. This is not only an economic necessity but a moral and political imperative. The choice before societies is stark: continue along a path of intensifying inequality and democratic decay, or act decisively to build an economy and polity that serve the many rather than the few. The future of democracy itself may depend on that choice.
The writer is an Odisha-based economist and columnist.