"On a global scale, an individual must have upwards of $744,400 in combined income, investments, and personal assets to rank in the top 1% of the world’s wealthiest individuals."
What does "combined income, investments, and personal assets" even mean? Income is money earned over some time period, how does one "combine" that with investments and assets?
If I earn $10 per month, have $20 in capital, and $15 in personal assets, how do you combine those numbers into a single number? What does that single number represent?
The number is called "net worth" and is slightly complicated if you're married or own a lot of illiquid assets. It also has debt and other liabilities subtracted so a house on mortgage or leased car, or company owned assets do not count, for example.
It does not count control of corporations and political power, which can be important as well. (But tend to go hand in hand to a degree.)
There's also gross worth which is a total lifetime worth. This would be high if you used for example expensive education. But then this one is much more nebulous.
An engineer's pre-tax salary in Europe would be like 20-60k euros in the South/East and 30-80k in the North.
The USA just has a lot more capital in tech so the demand for labor is a lot more robust. Europe has decent engineers but it's hard to command a high wage when there are a lot less companies competing for you and they have less capital to be able to pay you with.
That's a bullshit measure! What number of people make more than an arbitrary threshold value does not say anything. Maybe all these people made $90,000 seven years ago, and $100,000 is just the new $90,000 in 2017. It's a large organization, I'm surprised they had only 11 people above $100,000 in 2017.
What point do you think you are making with this citation?
The point that Oxfam these days is a business and reports like this are its product, and the metric of success is how much money these products make for Oxfam, not how much good they do. They technically still are a charity but they have strayed very far from their roots.
The flashy headline is basically saying first world living standards are unsustainable.