STWR - Share The World's Resources

Global levels of inequality threaten to halt progress toward economic development and efforts to alleviate deprivation such as the Millennium Development Goals, argues a new report.

15th July 08 - Sam Pizzigati, Too Much

Link to the full report: The Persistent Problem--Inequality, Difference, and the Challenge of Development

Not too long ago, the world’s exquisitely rich could always count on support from the world’s exquisitely educated. Economists and political scientists with degrees from the finest universities regularly plastered public policy circles with books, papers, and reports that treated the wealth of the wealthy as an absolutely necessary social good.

Sane societies, these educated experts argued, should gaze kindly on grand accumulations of private wealth. Their mantra: The more wealth accumulates, the more the wealthy invest, the more economies grow, the better off all of us will surely become.

With only marginal exceptions, eminently respectable mainstream analysts have been spouting this basic worldview for over a generation. They have genuflected before wealth and dismissed as simply silly any concerns and apprehensions about wealth’s unequal distribution.

Not anymore. The early years of the 21st century have seen a remarkable flow of papers and studies from entirely reputable international institutions — the World Bank for one — that actually treat our earth’s lopsided distribution of income and wealth as a chilling threat to humanity’s basic well-being.

Last week, another major institution rang that same bell. “Extremely high levels” of global inequality, the 14,000-member American Political Science Association said Thursday, “threaten to halt progress toward greater democratization and economic development for the poorest countries in the world.”

This verdict appears in a new Association task force report — The Persistent Problem: Inequality, Difference, and the Challenge of Development — that took 13 top political scientists three years to complete.

The report’s main point: “Inequality enables powerful actors to shape political and economic institutions to reinforce their power at the expense of others and the broader social welfare.”

The richer the rich become, in other words, the more damage they can do.

Political science boils down to the study of power, and The Persistent Problem patiently describes how wealth that concentrates at a society’s summit helps the powerful prevent badly needed social reform and frustrate the building of the sound infrastructures that healthy modern economies demand.

Concentrations of wealth at the top, the new study adds, also “empower elites to establish institutions that discriminate against, and marginalize, weaker groups, often provoking resistance that promotes violent conflict.”

The Persistent Problem doesn’t get terribly specific about the steps that can take us toward a more equal world. The report’s more modest objective: to make ignoring inequality indefensible.

Mission accomplished.

Link to original source

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Write comment