Oxfam, the global charity, has released its annual report on global wealth and the headline figures are shocking. According to the group, eight individuals own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world's population. Such concentrations of money and the power that goes with it should ring alarm bells, but the Oxfam report does not tell the entire story. The poor will always be with us, and will always demand the attention of those with a conscience, but the number of absolute poor is shrinking and the lot of those with less is improving. There is a long way to go, but to ignore those gains is to ignore too much.

Oxfam reckons that eight individuals — Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega (founder of Inditex, a fashion group), Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and Michael Bloomberg — own the same amount of wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity. (That is a stunning figure and one that seems even more impressive considering that last year's report concluded that 62 people balanced the world's bottom half; Oxfam now says its data was wrong and that only nine individuals held that wealth.) In 2010, the world's 43 richest people had assets equivalent to that of the poorest 50 percent.

That concentration of wealth is part of a larger set of trends. According to Oxfam, during the last quarter century the world's top 1 percent gained more income than the bottom 50 percent combined. Big business is enjoying boom years. The world's 10 biggest corporations together have more revenue than that of the government revenue of 180 countries combined. To provide some scale, the report notes that the CEO of one of the 100 companies on the FTSE-100 earns as much in a year as 10,000 people working in garment factories in Bangladesh. Vietnam's richest man earns more in a day than the poorest person earns in 10 years.