Inequality – Mind The Gap
There are now almost as many overweight people in the world (1.2bn) as there are underfed and malnourished. The overweight are almost all in developed countries, the malnourished in developing ones.
World Bank economist Lance Pritchett says: “The magnitude of the change in the absolute gaps in per capita incomes between rich and poor is staggering.” World Bank economist Branko Milanovic says: “The likelihood of escaping from the bottom rung is almost negligible.”iii
In Britain, inequality is at its highest level for 40 years.
In Britain, inequality is at its highest level for 40 years. Households in already-wealthy areas have tended to become disproportionately wealthier and many rich people live in areas segregated from the rest of society. At the same time, more households have become poor over the last 15 years. Between 2006 and 2007 the number of children living in poverty in the UK rose by 100,000 to 2.9 million and pensioner poverty increased by 300,000 to a total of 2.5 million.
The two accepted ways of reducing poverty are to either increase the size of the pie we all share or share the pie more equitably, but those in industrialised nations consume resources and produce waste at 32 times the rate of those in the non-industrialised world.
In the 1980s it took around $45 of global economic growth to generate $1 poverty reduction to people on $1/day or under. Today it takes $166 of global economic growth to generate $1 of poverty reduction for people living below $1/day. So now the rich have to get much richer for the poor to get just slightly less poor. And all that extra wealth for the rich is eating up our planet. This growth is pushing the planet to the edge of collapse and not getting us anywhere near equity. The rich get much richer, the poor get fractionally less poor and the planet burns. And it is the poor and mostly women who suffer most from ecological damage and are most threatened by climate change. The rich can buy Evian and move to a golf course slightly more inland – the poor have nowhere to go.
We are already using 20% more of the planet than it can withstand.
It is now established that we are already using 20% more of the planet than it can withstand and so it is clear that there is just not enough planet to go around based on current consumption in rich countries. Therefore it is now clear that it is simply not possible to grow the size of the “cake”. The alternative is to share out the “cake” more fairly, but unfortunately currently redistribution is heresy to the International Monetary Fund. If everyone in the world were brought up to the level of at least $3/day and wealth distribution and the growth-resource intensity kept the same as it is now – we would need 15 planets. We have only one.
“If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up,” Professor Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), wrote in the New York Times in January 2008, “It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people.”
The question is how much more unequal world income distribution can become, before the resulting political instabilities and flows of migrants reach the point of directly harming the Wellbeing of the Citizens of the rich world and the stability of their states?
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The issue of inequality is major security implication too – read Professor Paul Rogers from Bradford Department of Peace Studies, to name but one highly respected analyst. This kind of thinking reinforces the realist take on sustainability.
That is some grim stats man.
There are two ways to deal with a problem of this magnitude: 1. massive population reduction via war and disease, or 2. total redesign. I like option 2.
We, as a species, have to start from scratch and redesign how we do things, from cradle to cradle (to borrow from McDonough). Education, infrastructure, cities, transport and energy have to be redesigned. Passive houses show what can be done in terms of energy efficiency, geothermal is a huge source of energy, as are wind and solar, mag-lev trains show a lot of promise too for transportation, as does the Air Car, the Sky Car, and others. There are ideas out there in bucket-loads. What we need is a framework in which to deploy them equitably. The economics of scarcity can’t deliver the solutions humanity needs. Post-scarcity is the way forward, the path that will end our need for a rationing tool like money, which leads inexorably to corruption and greed, and embedded imbalances of power and “wealth.” Any direction based on scarcity can only lead to war and destruction.