The UNESCO "wealth of the 1%" sloganeering is one pet peeve of mine. This is the data where the article derives the claim "the top 3 richest people owning more

The UNESCO "wealth of the 1%" sloganeering is one pet peeve of mine. This is the data where the article derives the claim "the top 3 richest people owning more wealth than the bottom 160 million." The way they get this eye popping number is by summing up all financial debts and subtracting them from total financial assets. What this ends up doing is overwhelming the sum with the roughly $1.5 trillion in student debt. Unlike a mortgage or car loan, which trade financial debt for financial assets, student debt is an investment in human capital. According to this UNESCO data, the very poorest people in the world are American lawyers and doctors fresh out of medical school. These people have a great deal of non-financial wealth. But according to this methodology, such a person with $300k in debt plus 300 people with $1k in reported assets equals a total of zero. Running the numbers this way is great for shock value but it doesn't make any sense if you think about it.