Transcript
BARACK OBAMA:
In just the past 25 years, more than one billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty-- one billion. And sometimes when I'm talking to young interns at the White House, I remind them, if you had to choose a moment in history to be born and you didn't know ahead of time who you were going to be, you'd choose now because the world has never been less violent, healthier, better educated, more tolerant, with more opportunity for more people, and more connected than it is today.
INTERVIEWER:
Well, how might such claims be reconciled? Well, to help me, I'm joined by the author of The Divide, who's Jason Hickel, who's an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, and on the line from Washington by Marian Tupy, who is Senior Policy Analyst at the Centre for Global Liberty and Prosperity at the Cato Institute in Washington. Now, Jason, let me start with you. We just heard Obama talking there about what wonderful things are going on. But you're arguing in your book, aren't you, that inequality is getting more extreme. Perhaps you could flesh this out a bit more in terms of inequality growing. Tell me a little bit more about the signs of that.
JASON HICKEL:
Right. So, for example, what we've seen is an increase in the absolute number of people in poverty around the world from 1980 until today, and today we're seeing about 4.3 billion people under the international poverty line of $5 per day-- so a dramatic increase in the number of people over the past-- who are poor over the past 20, 25 years.
And we're also seeing an increase in inequality, as you pointed out. The gap-- the per capita income gap between the global north and the global south has expanded dramatically by a factor of three since the 1960s. And today we're seeing this also at the level of individuals. The richest eight people in the world have more wealth now than the poorest 50% of the world's population.
INTERVIEWER:
Well, those are certainly dramatic examples of inequality, I would have thought. Let me come to you, Marian Tupy, over there in Washington. I mean, would you agree, first of all, that inequality is, if you like, a worsening problem, that there is growing inequality? And secondly, how would you want to relate this to the argument about poverty decreasing in the world?
MARIAN TUPY:
Well, most academic studies, including those of Paolo Liberati at University of Rome, also Branko Milanovic from the World Bank, and a number of other studies, including the Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton, all agree that income inequality in the world is decreasing rather than increasing. And the reason for that is that you have a tremendous number of people, especially in China, where incomes are actually growing at a faster pace than they are in the West. And consequently, the income gap between the West and the rest is declining.
Now, of course, it is true that in different regions of the world economies grow at different pace. So the income gap between Africa and the United States, for example, is still increasing, but it has decreased tremendously between the United States and a number of Asian countries, primarily China.
One last thing I want to mention is that I think there is an unhealthy obsession with looking at income differential and income inequality because, of course, there are a number of other inequalities which are arguably even more important where the gap is decreasing. For example, the inequality in infant mortality is decreasing around the world. Maternal mortality is decreasing around the world. The gap between life expectancy is decreasing between the West and the rest. So in many ways, inequality is actually shrinking rather than growing.