Every institution wants its own report, preferably on glossy paper. It is of course ironic to see institutions that make much of their money by managing fortunes filling the role of government statistical agencies by seeking to produce objective information about the global distribution of wealth. It is also important to note that these reports must often rely on heroic hypotheses and approximations, not all of them convincing, in order to arrive at anything like a “global” view of wealth. In any case, they rarely cover anything more than the past few years, a decade at most, and are
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