If the ubiquity of Jeffrey Sachs is any indication, the eradication of extreme poverty - defined as living on less than $1 a day - is the sexy humanitarian issue of the 2000s. His movement to end poverty has spawned the Millennium Development Goals, lobby groups such as the ONE campaign, a celebrity entourage as shown by the participants at Live 8 and other initiatives that have more or less caught the developed world's attention.
During the upcoming EPIIC Symposium on Global Poverty and Inequality, I will be moderating a small group discussion on capitalism. This session, open to the entire Tufts community, will examine methods of manipulating capitalism to mitigate inequality, as well as alternative economic systems that could provide a more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity.
According to the World Bank, 1.1 billion people lived in extreme poverty around the world in 2001. This number is a vast improvement over the 1.5 billion living under the same conditions in 1981. Within this time period, many countries have generated enormous amounts of wealth; among the most notable are countries such as China and Vietnam, which had experienced debilitating poverty and instability just several years prior.
With that in mind, one of the motivations of Sachs' campaign is to initiate one big and final push to bring prosperity to those still living under extreme poverty. However, this big push brings up a troubling question: What will poverty look like when everybody is making more than $1 a day? It's hard to believe that this phenomenon would suddenly disappear. Instead, poverty would evolve from an absolute concept into a relative one: into inequality.
Inequality means the uneven distribution of wealth, and therefore the economic, social and political opportunities that wealth generates. Unequal income distribution has been on the rise since the Industrial Revolution, as development economists, such as Lant Pritchett, have shown.
In his paper, "Divergence, Big Time," Pritchett found that the per-capita GDP of the richest country was 8.7 times that of the poorest country in 1870. More than a century later, in 1990, the richest country's GDP per capita was 45.2 times that of the poorest country. Especially notable is that both of these calculations were done with China and India in the mix, showing that even with the unprecedented growth of these two countries, inequality has increased significantly as a whole.
These statistics show the troubling fact that as more incomes rise above the $1-a-day baseline, nothing has changed for those at the bottom. More wealth means higher prices and therefore continued malnutrition or starvation, contraction of preventable diseases and a lack of access to primary education - in other words, continued poverty.
In developed countries, the lower classes may not know destitution, but they still face serious deprivation. Lack of access to affordable and comprehensive healthcare and affordable higher education in a global economy that emphasizes college degrees still plague these groups. The bottom line is that the working classes in rich countries lack the economic security to pursue the opportunities that most of us take for granted.
This stark reality contradicts the perception of the progress that we have supposedly made. Gross injustice - slavery, imperialism, racism and sexism - is a relic of the past. Yet poverty and its attendant suffering disproportionately affect historically marginalized groups, such as African Americans, indigenous populations in Latin America and people living in Haiti's central plateau. Slavery still exists in the form of sexual and other human trafficking, mostly affecting women, who are greatly affected by poverty on a global scale. Economic inequality based on race also underpins many other pressing political issues, such as illegal immigration and universal healthcare reform.
Most egregiously, all of this has happened under the system of capitalism, which countless intellectuals and laymen have praised as the best way to generate prosperity for all. In 1991, the Cold War ended and the United States sought to globalize the system with the promotion of free trade. Despite the implementation of countless free trade regimes since the 1990s, inequality persists.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has resulted in heavy backlash in both the U.S. and Mexico, with American factory workers and farmers losing their jobs to those on the other side of the country's southern border. NAFTA became the latest wealth-generating initiative that the Mexican government did not share with the indigenous people living in Mexico's poorest state, Chiapas. This led to an armed uprising against the government in 1994.
True poverty eradication and social justice mean an end to economic inequality. It is time to discuss whether an economic system that has benefited us is right for the rest of the world. And no matter what your views on the relationship between capitalism and inequality, it is time for us to take up the cause of fighting inequality as the moral dilemma of the 21st century.
I urge you to join me in the 2007-2008 EPIIC symposium on Global Poverty and Inequality, running from Feb. 21 to Feb. 24. Tickets will be on sale Feb. 13 to Feb. 20 in the Campus Center, Dewick, Carmichael and the Fletcher School.
Phoenix Tso is a sophomore majoring in international relations.
