Simon Reid-Henry - The Political Origins of Inequality: Why a More Equal World Is Better for Us All

There is no wealth but life.

John Ruskin, Unto This Last

By the end of the twentieth century they earned seventy-four times as much.

Measured in terms of wealth, rather than income, the picture is even more extreme. Globally, the richest 1% now own nearly half of all the worlds wealth. The poorest 50% of the world, by contrastfully 3 billion peopleown less than 1% of its wealth.

There is growing awareness today of the consequences in rich countries of rising inequality: we know what it means to talk of the 1% there. But when it comes to the much greater gaps between rich and poor the world over, we confine ourselves still to talk of global poverty. How often are we told that, if only we could see what life is like in a cramped slum in Dhaka or on some scrabble of land in rural Chad, we would be moved to help?

But the problem is not one of empathy. We are all familiar with the shape of a human body in hunger. The details, like glass paper, scarcely catch the imagination any more. It is not one of distance, either. A growing number of the wealthiest people in this world live in high-rise apartments that tower up and over the slums belowand they know only too well that

The problem, rather, is one of perspective, of what we choose not to see. There is no shortage of books telling us why nations fail or what the bottom billion on this planet must do to succeed, no shortage of policy papers from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund saying much the same. But we still have not properly confronted how the poverty and suffering of a great many are connected to the wealth and privilege of a few.

We are slow to admit that the problem is one not of poverty traps at the bottom of the pyramid but of a great confinement of wealth at the top. It is a telling coincidence indeed that the past fifteen years, a period when global wealth more than doubled (from $117 trillion in 2000 to $263 trillion in 2014), have also been the age of the Millennium Development Goals (with their headline ambition of halving the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day).

There is a politics to this, but it is all too often ignored in a debate which to date has preferred to focus on the economics of the problem alone: as if the long-run dynamics of capital and income could be separate to the political history in which they are set. The primary purpose of this book is to paint this wider political context back into the picture, since our problems stem less from market forces than from the failed policies behind them. If this is partly cause for despair, then it is also cause for hope: our present predicaments are more amenable to change than we are often encouraged to believe.

But acting on the politics of inequality requires first grasping the full scale of the problem before us. Few of the worlds richest people

This means that inequality is felt differently at different scales, even as those scales are increasingly connected. In rich and poor countries alike, however, and perhaps above all between them, inequality is a product of ingrained norms of status and rights that disqualify the needs and claims of some relative to others. The making of those norms in modern society is the history of the struggle between forces that seek to privatise public gain and forces that seek to nurture strong societies. To understand inequality, in its fullness, requires grasping this first of all. The exclusion of the poor via migration controls internationally, for example, is of a piece with the exclusion of particular social groups, such as Latinos, within a city like Los Angeles: there is a common core to both problems that it is possible to isolate and understand.

There are an increasing number of reasons to try. The extent to which the rich and powerful are today able to influence rules and procedures in a country like America is in part a product of the wealth they have accumulated elsewhere in the world; the struggle to make ends meet experienced by ordinary folk in austerity-ridden Greece is of a piece with very probems that the poorest of this world have confronted all along. Accordingly, there is no singular us versus them around which to build a greater justice. No clear-cut boundary to the problem of inequality. There are ongoing structures of exclusion and marginalisation and the imperative to try to understand their operation.

Hanging above the UN Security Council chamber is a vast mural painted by the Norwegian artist Per Krohg. The mural depicts a world rebuilding itself, after two world wars, on the principles of democracy, human rights, and equality. Seventy years later, and like the phoenix that Krohg places at the heart of his picture, this book opens upon the scene of a world still divided. In rich and poor countries alike, inequalities are Today we all need to do better at finding out how the water is.

The incentive could hardly be greater. Inequality is the fount and matrix, to borrow a phrase from the great economic historian Karl Polanyi, of a great many of our eras most pressing global problems, be it climate change, food insecurity, economic volatility, or the demographic crises of migration and population growth. The world elites anxieties about migration and security will not go away if we cannot reduce the incentives for others to leave their own moribund nations or for economic actors to trade on terms that they may take hope or reason much to care from.

In difficult times we are tempted, if not encouraged, to look inwards, to lower our ambitions and shutter up our hopes. But global inequality is a challenge that we can meet only if we are prepared to do the opposite of that which conventional wisdom supposes: to look upwards and outwards, to think bigger not smaller, and to confront head-on the very heart of a problem which ails us all.