经济学人: Working out who earns what is surprisingly tricky. Both the very rich, who sometimes try to keep their wealth from the taxman, and the very poor, who are sometimes mistrustful of clipboard-wielding officials, are especially hard to pin down. Nevertheless, before the covid-19 pandemic, household surveys consistently found a fall in the number of people living in poverty. The World Bank counted 659m living on less than $2.15 a day in 2019, down from around 2bn in 1990. 弄清楚谁赚多少钱是非常棘手的。无论是非常富有的人(有时试图向税务员隐瞒自己的财富)还是非常贫穷的人(有时不信任挥舞着剪贴板的官员),都特别难以确定。然而,在 covid-19 大流行之前,家庭调查一致发现贫困人口数量有所下降。世界银行估计,2019 年有 6.59 亿人每天生活费不足 2.15 美元,低于 1990 年的约 20 亿。 Yet this progress came at a cost: a global “precariat” emerged, members of which were barely out of poverty and perilously exposed to shocks, while the top 1% got rich faster. That, at least, is the received wisdom. The World Inequality Database, a project associated with Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, two economists, combines tax data with other ...