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Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life,

and I'm Tim Harford.

Now loyal listeners, Ed Hopper, Matthew French and Jamie Wallace each got in touch to ask us to work our magic on the claim that 62 people now own as much wealth as half of the world's population. You may also have seen

headlines that suggest that 1% of the world's population now own more than the

other 99% put together. This is the latest iteration of Oxfam's annual

report looking at global inequality. They say that overall the world may be

getting richer but that most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer and

fewer people.

We've looked at this number in previous years but apparently we need to tackle it yet again.

Oxfam have got the data on the poor as they do every year from a study conducted

by academics commissioned by the bank Credit Suisse.

The Credit Suisse report adds up people's wealth, that's all our assets, minus all their debts, to produce a figure for their

net worth.

According to Credit Suisse, the combined net worth of the poorest half of the world is $1.76 trillion dollars.

Then Oxfam turned to the list of the richest people in the world,

...