trying to understand

I went to a session last night on "Understanding Poverty," put on by the lovely people at Crossroads, and just now came across a review of a book by the same name on the NY Review of Books, via a post on 3quarksdaily (phew! that was a lot of information...). Have yet to read the entire review, but one statistic really sticks out to me so far: "the world's five hundred wealthiest people have the same income as the world's poorest 416 million." Wow -- that really puts the world's uneven distribution of resources into perspective...