STATISTICS telling us how unequal the world is can be hard to get our heads round. Millions and billions are not numbers reflecting our daily experience of the world, and our brains find it difficult to conceptualise just how huge they are.

As a result it is easy to become indifferent to the reams of statistics we are bombarded with every day: that the NHS will face a funding gap of £30 billion by 2020, that the national debt has risen from £960bn to £1.5 trillion since David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010 or that tax dodging costs the Exchequer £120bn a year. We don’t always know what such figures mean.

So many people will shrug at Oxfam’s finding today that the richest 62 people on Earth own as much as the poorest 3,600,000,000 people and go about their business.