The Shifting Nature of Inequality
Dec. 24th, 2002 01:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThis point got brought up in the course of Saturday night's discussion at ebeloic's apartment--I think I raised it, but I'm not altogether sure.
The rapid growth of income inequality over the past two centuries, as Europe, North America, Japan, and selected other regions have managed to complete the transition to post-industrialism, most of Latin America and parts of Asia have managed to industrialize to at least a middling area, and the rest of the world has only begun to move beyond rural agricultural economies. The resulting unequal distribution of wealth globally has rightly been seen as one of the major causes of global instability.
I wonder, though, if the world before the Industrial Revolution really was that egalitarian. The income differential between, say, Surat and Amsterdam, might have been marginal; but then, wealth was distributed quite unevenly worldwide on the basis of class. With industrialization and the consequent creation of a global economy, income inequality gradually ceased to be linked to class in national societies, particularly with the development of the welfare state abroad and the establishment of colonial/semi-colonial relationships with the non-industrial world. Income differentials eventually ended up, in the current semi-free global economy of nowadays still hindered by limits on free trade and migration, being defined by global classes: not only core and periphery, but the different gradations within core and periphery.
The closer you are to the core, the larger the middle and upper classes; the farther away from the core, the more impoverished your population.
A hypothesis: If global barriers to free trade and migration do come down, global income might well be more evenly distributed on the international level, but internally (especially in developed countries) income inequality will increase sharply, as income distribution returns to its historic patterns of global equality and class inequality.
Thoughts?
The rapid growth of income inequality over the past two centuries, as Europe, North America, Japan, and selected other regions have managed to complete the transition to post-industrialism, most of Latin America and parts of Asia have managed to industrialize to at least a middling area, and the rest of the world has only begun to move beyond rural agricultural economies. The resulting unequal distribution of wealth globally has rightly been seen as one of the major causes of global instability.
I wonder, though, if the world before the Industrial Revolution really was that egalitarian. The income differential between, say, Surat and Amsterdam, might have been marginal; but then, wealth was distributed quite unevenly worldwide on the basis of class. With industrialization and the consequent creation of a global economy, income inequality gradually ceased to be linked to class in national societies, particularly with the development of the welfare state abroad and the establishment of colonial/semi-colonial relationships with the non-industrial world. Income differentials eventually ended up, in the current semi-free global economy of nowadays still hindered by limits on free trade and migration, being defined by global classes: not only core and periphery, but the different gradations within core and periphery.
(Canada and the United States both belong to the core, but Canada traditionally provided labour and raw materials to the United States; Afghanistan and Pakistan both belong to the periphery, but even before the Soviet invasion of the former country Afghanistani labour migration to Pakistan had a long history; Israel, Greece, Poland, Argentina, South Korea, and Thailand belong to that nebulous category of the semiperiphery.)
The closer you are to the core, the larger the middle and upper classes; the farther away from the core, the more impoverished your population.
A hypothesis: If global barriers to free trade and migration do come down, global income might well be more evenly distributed on the international level, but internally (especially in developed countries) income inequality will increase sharply, as income distribution returns to its historic patterns of global equality and class inequality.
Thoughts?
