The Global History of Inequality

Abstract

Inequality has increased in most Western countries since the early 1980s. In a recent report, the international non-governmental organization Oxfam noted that the twenty-six richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest fifty per cent of the world's population. Discontent with the growing disparities in wealth and income has soared in recent years, especially in the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis and the “Great Recession” that followed. The Occupy movement protested against the greed of the “one per cent”, referring to the highly skewed income distribution in the US. Former US president Barack Obama proclaimed the growth of within-country economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time”. Yet, he enacted few policies that reduced inequality during his two terms in office; the Gini coefficient in the US actually increased slightly between 2007 and 2016. His successor, whose election has often been explained as a consequence of these high levels of inequality, has slashed taxes for the wealthy, probably causing further rises in inequality in the future. In this essay, I will review two recent economic history books that examine the historical roots of within-country inequality on a global scale: Branko Milanovic's Global Inequality (2016) and Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler (2017). Formerly a lead economist at the World Bank, Milanovic is a well-known scholar working in the field of economic inequality, while Scheidel has a background as a specialist in the economic, social, and demographic history of antiquity.

Inequality and Globalization: A Review Essay

“…com/system/files/documents/milanovic20160509ppt.pdf.) 13 This illustrates the limitations of focusing on the median as the key distributional statistic, as advocated by Birdsall and Meyer (2015). The growth rate of the global median is hardly representative of the results in figure 2; it is especially deceptive about how incomes of the poorest have evolved.…”

“…The largest percentage gain in the elephant graph is close to the global median. 13 In Milanovic's interpretation, the emerging middle class in the developing world have been the big gainers from globalization, while the losers were the (relatively) poor and middle class within the rich world.…”

Toward an inclusive digital economy for all: Perspectives from an intersectional feminist social work lens

“…Despite these alarming trends in the last two decades of rapidly growing disparities, there has been little critical analysis of modern wealth and income inequality in political discourse due to being pegged as unfashionable socialism (De Zwart, 2019). However, recently, inequality has been brought under the spotlight.…”

“…Professor Sir Angus Deaton, a Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, argues that the rising inequality shows that democratic capitalism is failing (Deaton, 2019). Thomas Piketty’s (2014) popular book Capital in the 21 st Century is the prime example of promoting critical analysis of these trends and has been the number one bestseller in the New York Times and sold over 2.5 million copies in 40 languages since its publication (De Zwart, 2019). Unfortunately, within mainstream social work discourse, income and wealth inequality has not been a focal point despite the direct connections with social work practice.…”