In January 2026, Oxfam presented its annual report at Davos: the twelve richest people on Earth now hold more wealth than the poorest four billion, half of humanity. Leo Tolstoy explained why 140 years ago, without a single chart.
By Ángel Bonet · Founder of ImpactCo
In January 2026, Oxfam presented its annual inequality report at Davos, Resisting the Rule of the Rich. Its headline figure: twelve billionaires now hold more wealth than the poorest half of humanity, which is more than four billion people.
The report adds that billionaire wealth grew by more than 16% in 2025 alone, reaching a record $18.3 trillion, and has risen 81% since 2020. Greed has not slowed down. Instead, it has become more efficient.
Leo Tolstoy explained this better than any Davos report, and he did it 140 years ago without a single chart.
The Story of Pahom
In 1886, Tolstoy wrote a short story for Russian peasants who could barely read. It is called How Much Land Does a Man Need?, and it tells the story of Pahom, a modest peasant who declares one day that with enough land he wouldn’t fear the Devil himself. The Devil, Tolstoy writes, was listening behind the stove, and he took note.
Pahom begins to buy land, yet it is never enough: each new plot makes him feel slightly poorer. Eventually he reaches the Bashkirs, a nomadic people who offer him all the land he can walk around in a single day for a thousand roubles. There is one condition. He must be back at his starting point before sunset, or he loses everything.
Pahom sets out at dawn and walks greedily, widening the circle every time he sees better land a little further on. When he finally works out how far he still has to go, he realises he has gone too far.
So he runs. His heart pounds as he throws off his coat and boots, never letting go of his spade, while the sun sinks towards the horizon.
He reaches the hill just as the sun sets, and falls dead from exhaustion. His servant digs the grave with that same spade: three arshins, a little over two metres, from head to heels. In the end, that was all the land a man needed.
A Writer Who Lived His Own Critique
What sets Tolstoy apart from a mere fabulist is that he didn’t stop at the literary warning. He lived his own critique.
As early as 1859, he opened a school for peasant children on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana. In the final decades of his life he went further. He renounced the rights to much of his work, personally organised famine relief during the Russian famine of 1891–92, and tried to give up the property he believed belonged to those who worked it. He also read Henry George, whose idea was to tax land as a common good, and he defended it publicly at a time when that was deeply uncomfortable for someone of his standing.
His moral vision held that limitless accumulation corrodes the one who accumulates before it corrodes society. That vision directly influenced Gandhi, who corresponded with Tolstoy during the last year of his life, and through Gandhi it reached Martin Luther King. Rarely has an idea travelled so far without a single PowerPoint slide.
Pahom Is Still Walking
Today, Pahom’s land isn’t measured in hectares. Instead, it is measured in market share, data, market capitalisation and funding rounds. The mechanism is identical: every goal reached reveals a more ambitious horizon, and the feeling of scarcity grows at exactly the same pace as the balance sheet.
Twelve people with more wealth than half of humanity are not twelve anomalies. They are the logical, entirely predictable outcome of a model that confuses growing with extracting.
At ImpactCo, we have long defended a distinction that seems simple but isn’t. On one side there is extractive capital; on the other, there is capital that grows roots.
The first behaves exactly like Pahom. It runs towards the horizon without looking at the clock, convinced the limit is always a little further away. Eventually it collapses, exhausted, having destroyed along the way the very ground that sustained it.
The second understands that the common good is not a limit on profit but its most durable source. A company, investor or country that takes care of the ground it stands on (its people, its community and the planet that lends it its resources) is not sacrificing returns. Rather, it is avoiding death by exhaustion on the last hill. That is the essence of the purpose economy.
Tolstoy didn’t write a story about individual greed. Without knowing it, he wrote the first inequality report in history.
And its conclusion matches Oxfam’s: we keep running towards a horizon we don’t need, while the grave we will actually occupy measures little more than two metres.
Do you want to build capital that grows roots rather than capital that extracts? Write to us: tribu@impactco.es. Ángel Bonet is the founder of ImpactCo, a boutique consultancy specialised in the purpose economy and sustainability.