In a recent article, the novelist and academic China Miéville warns progressives against adopting the cynical savviness so characteristic of mainstream punditry.

“Becoming a radical critic of capitalism,” Miéville writes, “involves a process of disenchantment, the dying of surprise at the system’s depredations; but being one, a long-term witness to those depredations, is to repeatedly discover that we can be shocked by what no longer surprises us.”

That’s something to bear in mind when reading the latest Oxfam report into inequality in the global economy, a document that reveals that 62 individuals now control more wealth than the bottom half of the planet’s population.

Such statistics should come as a shock: not necessarily a surprise but something more like an electrical jolt, awakening us to the global order we’ve constructed, now, in its everyday operations, demonstrably more unfair than any previous society in human history.

In the ancient world, the rulers lived in a luxury denied to their subjects, so much so that they often imagined themselves deities. But there were material limits to their delusions. Rich or poor, noble or commoner, everyone on the Nile Delta or the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia crescent suffered alike from disease and natural disaster and the other privations of a low-tech society without medicine or science.

In 1844, Marx discussed the super-wealthy of his own time, explaining how they took on the properties of the money they possessed:

I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with 24 feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good.

To update that list, add everything made possible for the wealthy by the almost magical technology of the 21st century. Once you do, it’s clear that today’s elite don’t need to imagine themselves gods. By every meaningful measure, that’s what they are. They have absorbed, via their wealth, all the attributes that religion traditionally attributed to divinities, even as the world’s poorest still endure conditions familiar to the labourers who constructed the pyramids.

Back in 1999, Adrian Peacock entitled his book on globalisation 200 Pharaohs: Five Billion Slaves. It’s now 17 years later and all that’s changed is the ratio.

Some will argue that income equality doesn’t matter, that we should concern ourselves only with absolutes. Between 1990 and 2010, they remind us, the number of people classified as enduring extreme poverty fell by a half. Economic growth in China and India lifts all boats – and, if some vessels have floated rather higher than others, at least they’re all rising.

But life in poverty (rather than extreme poverty) still means a deprivation unimaginable to the wealthy. How, then, does one morally justify a distribution of resources that allocates so very little to so many and gives a tiny few more than they can ever consume?

According to Oxfam, the wealth of those richest 62 people grew by more than half a trillion dollars since 2010, even as the wealth of the bottom half of the world dropped by 41%. That, mind you, took place in the period after the global financial crisis, during the years of supposed recovery.

In other words, inequality increased massively when the economy was growing, with most of the new wealth created going to the rich rather than those who needed it most. As the report explains, “in almost all rich countries and in most developing countries, the share of national income going to workers has been falling”. In contrast, “the owners of capital have seen their capital consistently grow (through interest payments, dividends, or retained profits) faster than the rate the economy has been growing”.

In the key scene in the Orson Welles movie The Third Man, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) confronts Harry Lime (Welles) while they ride the Vienna ferris wheel. He accuses Lime of selling penicillin on the black market: essentially, risking the lives of the sick to enrich himself. Lime scoffs at Martins’ concerns.

“Look down there,” he says, pointing at the revellers way down on the ground. “Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?”

Lime’s question illustrates the implications of the Oxfam figures, extending well beyond economics. What, for example, can democracy possibly mean in a society resting on such disparities between the blessed and the damned?

“All men are created equal,” explained the Declaration of Independence. At the time, Thomas Jefferson’s slaves might have found that assurance rather hard to swallow. Nonetheless, by the mid-20th century, the social equality upon which genuine democracy necessarily rests seemed at least vaguely possible, with the American poor able to imagine themselves (as Steinbeck put it) not as a permanently exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Today, though, the notion that our 62 god-kings can be in any way constrained or controlled by Joe and Jane Citizen dropping their votes in a ballot box is too ludicrous for serious contemplation. On the contrary, the multibillionaire relates to the pauper as predator does to its prey, with the vast human flock simply a resource that, in Pushkin’s phrase, can be “either slaughtered or shorn”.

Warren Buffett puts it like this: “Sure there is class war, and it is my class, the rich, who are making it and we are winning.”

Again, let’s emphasise that the Oxfam study describes developments since the world recovered from the global financial crisis. Today, we can all hear the Chinese economy sputtering and misfiring, and the reassurances from politicians sound (to borrow an old gag) rather like the Titanic’s captain announcing: “Nothing to worry about, ladies and gentlemen – we are merely stopping briefly to take on some ice.”

If the poor missed out during the boom, what do you suppose is about to happen to them during the coming slump?

In an era such as ours, it’s easy for progressives to develop a protective layer of cynicism, an ironic detachment predicated on the conviction that nothing can actually be changed. But we can’t afford that now. It’s way past time to rediscover some anger.