In 2017 Oxfam, the international aid organization, ran a campaign pointing out that the eight richest people in the world own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population—that is, as much as 3.6 billion people! Such extreme inequality seems blatantly unfair, but from the inequality alone, we cannot conclude that those eight richest people have made their fortunes in ways that caused the poorer half of the world’s people to be worse off. It is possible that the billionaires became rich by inventing products made in factories that provided workers with better jobs than they would
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