<
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/great-convergence-equality-branko-milanovic>
"We live in an age of inequality—or so we’re frequently told. Across the globe,
but especially in the wealthy economies of the West, the gap between the rich
and the rest has widened year after year and become a chasm, spreading anxiety,
stoking resentment, and roiling politics. It is to blame for everything from
the rise of former U.S. President Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the
United Kingdom to the “yellow vest” movement in France and the recent protests
of retirees in China, which has one of the world’s highest rates of income
inequality. Globalization, the argument goes, may have enriched certain elites,
but it hurt many other people, ravaging one-time industrial heartlands and
making people susceptible to populist politics.
There is much that is true about such narratives—if you look only at each
country on its own. Zoom out beyond the level of the nation-state to the entire
globe, and the picture looks different. At that scale, the story of inequality
in the twenty-first century is the reverse: the world is growing more equal
than it has been for over 100 years.
The term “global inequality” refers to the income disparity between all
citizens of the world at a given time, adjusted for the differences in prices
between countries. It is commonly measured by the Gini coefficient, which runs
from zero, a hypothetical case of full equality in which every person earned
the same amount, to 100, another hypothetical case in which a single individual
made all the income. Thanks to the empirical work of many researchers,
economists can draw the overall contours of the change in estimated global
inequality over the past two centuries."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-inequality-aids-south-africa-tortoises-galapagos/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
