The Atlas of Global Inequalities. Ben Crow

institutions, such as a corporation or a family, through practices of interaction, including labor hiring, housing allocation, and the borrowing and lending of money, and through the language we use to explain, think about and enact our daily lives. They are, in other words, dispersed throughout all elements of human existence, and they may influence action at all levels, from face-to-face contact to national and international dealings. One pattern evident from the map of the Human Development Index, and throughout the pages of this atlas, is the difference between those who live in the industrialized “North” of the globe, and those who live in the non-industrialized “South”. With few exceptions, birth in a non-industrialized (developing) nation predisposes two-thirds of the world’s population to disadvantage in almost all dimensions of inequality. This happens because the growth of industrial productivity transforms many aspects of society, and the life possibilities of most, if not all, in that nation. We can identify this process as the distantiation of the North from the South, involving also elements of exploitation and exclusion during and since colonial rule. The evidence from historical studies of income and economic production (see pages 16–17) suggests that increasing productivity as the North industrialized was the main force driving this distantiation. There is an irony or paradox that North–South distantiation continues in the 21st century, even as travel and communication times are reduced by technological innovation. Analytical approach The analytical approach that informs this atlas is that of Amartya Sen. In his work on inequality, famine and poverty (1981, 1992, 1999), Sen distinguished some useful analytical categories: Entitlements and capabilities – social and individual relations giving command over a desired functioning, for example, employment of laborers, which entitles them to a wage with which to buy food; Functionings – desired individual outcomes such as a long life or being nourished; Freedoms – a broad set, including political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security. Functionings and freedoms are things that people want to do and to be. In other words, Sen describes inequalities in relation to desirable achievements, the lives that people value. Then, his analysis identifies the specific entitlements and capabilities that enable a

      10

      outcome. Most strikingly, this approach has been applied to reconceptualize social advance or development: Expansion of freedom is viewed, in this approach, both as the primary end and as the principal means of development. Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency. (Sen 1999; xii) These ideas have helped make a significant opening for human advancement, and helped foster an analysis that rescued the tragedy of famine from scholarly and governmental indifference. The ideas of entitlements and capabilities helped disaggregate social relationships, providing new language for interdisciplinary understanding of, and action on, this most desperate of human crises. Recognition of the importance of achieved functionings, notably life expectancy, provided new ways of thinking about progress. This spurred wide global debate, notably among government agencies, and led to new measures of social progress. The idea of plural freedoms, criticism

      11

      notwithstanding (Agarwal, Humphries and Robeyns 2005: 8-9), has helped revitalize the study of social change, and facilitated analysis and action to recognize and mitigate multidimensional inequality. There is, as Therborn notes, a need to make this analytical approach more accessible and useful for empirical research. Ideas of entitlement, capability, functionings and freedoms are not easily understood or measured. They provide a way of disaggregating human achievements, the lives we want, and the complex social and physical processes that produce them. In this atlas, the analytical approach helps to illuminate the multiple dimensions of inequality, and an exploration of current understanding of the social dynamics of each. To make sense of the many dimensions of inequality, the atlas is structured around a set of categories based on terms in common usage. Human Development Index In 1990, the UN Development Program, one of the UN’s less influential agencies, engaged one of the most powerful (the World Bank) in a discussion about how to represent human achievement. At stake was whether progress should be measured by the proliferation of goods, or by the length and quality of people’s lives. The UNDP, drawing partly on ideas from Amartya Sen, proposed measuring human achievement with the Human Development Index, an aggregate measure combining life expectancy, literacy and an improved indicator of productivity (GDP per capita at Purchasing Power Parity – see page 118 for definition). No single indicator is adequate to represent the multiple dimensions of global inequality, but the HDI has opened up discussion of social priorities. The HDI reveals the importance of action, usually governmental or collective, through programs that redistribute, include, and protect the interests of the disadvantaged. The diagram (right) demonstrates that there is not necessarily a direct correlation between national income and human development. Saudi Arabia, for example, is famously rich from oil royalties, but achieves less for its citizens in terms of life expectancy and literacy than does Cuba, with one-third the GDP per capita. Countries with similar national incomes per capita, such as Armenia, Egypt, and Angola, have HDI scores that are very different. This reinforces the point that government action for the disadvantaged matters. On the whole, however, industrialized areas of North America and Europe tend to have a high HDI, while non-industrialized, developing, areas of Africa and South America have lower HDI, as is evident from the map on pages 10–11. Social action in countries with low levels of income can raise their HDI scores to match the scores of countries with higher income primarily by reducing inequality and increasing the efficacy of spending on health and education. Although most countries’ HDI score has been increasing, inequalities between rural and urban areas persist, especially in those countries, such as China, where the national economy is booming. The rural population in every province of China experiences worse living conditions, on average, than those registered as urban (which

      12

      does not include rural migrants working in towns and cities). The greatest discrepancy between rural and urban is found in the predominantly rural provinces. Critics of the HDI question the reliance on only three dimensions of human development to indicate human capabilities and well-being. They also assert that failure to include ecological and gender considerations renders HDI an inadequate measure of human development. It is clear, nonetheless, that the discussion begun in 1990 by publication of the first Human Development Report, has created space for a broader conception of human goals than was prevalent at that time. Problems with the national view The genre of the global statistical atlas, of which this is an example, rests on the growth of international agencies, with first the League of Nations and then the United Nations, and their need to publish compilations of national statistics that illustrate the scale of the issues they address. There are risks in the use of these statistics. Constant repetition of global maps can reinforce the simple idea that nations are the appropriate and exclusive unit for analyzing inequalities and social change. We have sought to mitigate this risk through the use of graphs, maps, and charts that illustrate differences along lines of gender, class or ethnicity, and through the occasional use of spatial distributions within one country. We leave the reader to remember the differences within her or his own nation, to be unsatisfied by national averages, and to question ideas that nations rather than people organize social change. Ben Crow Suresh Lodha Santa Cruz, August 2010

      13

      14

      Economic Inequalities

      R Economic differences are the most common focus of study and comment, partly because they are most easily measured. They are given prominence at the beginning of this atlas, however, because they are a major underlying driver of many of the social inequalities covered in the rest of the book. The wealthiest tenth of the global population receives 58 percent of annual incomes, and owns 71 percent of household wealth – assets, property and capital. And while the average income of the richest decile is 94 times that of the poorest, the ratio between the average household wealth of the richest and poorest deciles is an almost unimaginable 175,750:1. Redressing the negative effects of income and wealth inequality is complicated, not least because the social processes involved in raising productivity and living standards also create inequalities. The global system of capitalism has been successful in harnessing technical and social innovation to generate increased productivity. This has enabled higher living standards, notably