Equality or fairness?

A list put out by Forbes India says that India has 69 dollar-billionaires. That gives the country a near 7 per cent share of the world’s billionaires (said to total 1,011), whereas its share of world GDP is just 2 per cent, and of global poverty an embarrassing 30 per cent. So many billionaires in the midst of a sea of poor people is, of course, a sign of inequality, and some call the contrast an obscenity. Comparisons are made between the wealth of a few ($300 billion for our 69 billionaires) and the country’s GDP ($1,500 billion this year); but this is like comparing apples and (say) rivers, because the first is stock and the second is flow. If one must make comparisons, they have to be between the stock of wealth owned by the super-rich, and the stock of wealth that the rest of the country owns. Looked at this way, it would seem that the billionaires own barely 3 per cent of the total assets in the country, or less.