Return to: Book NewsContemporary Economic InequalityImagine living each day with little food to nourish you and your family. This is a reality for over 800 million severely food insecure children and adults around the world, while “moderate … food insecurity disrupts the lives of an additional 1.47 billion individuals.”1 The data shines a light on the world’s enormous disparities in wealth and income, which not only divide countries into haves and have nots, but also segment the globe into rich and poor nations.2 According to a pioneering study3 conducted by the World Inequality Lab in 2022, 76% of the world’s total wealth belongs to just 10% of its inhabitants, with just 2% of all wealth belonging to half of the world’s population.4 And while there may be disagreement over research methodology5 and the technical understandings of “wealth” and “income,”6 there is no denying that in many countries across the world, the richest are getting richer and the poorest are getting poorer.7 Many workers in the world are simply unable to improve their economic situation, more often in poorer countries, but increasingly in wealthy nations like the U.S. and U.K. as well.8 Much of the economic inequality present in our society is not the result of meritocratic competition but rather the result of systems that foster power imbalances and unequal opportunities for those with power and privilege.9 The technological and political processes responsible for wealth and income disparities are varied and rooted in hundreds of years of human history.10 They affect billions of lives worldwide11 and continue to evolve as we move into the future.12 From endemic poverty13 to political instability14 and catastrophic climate change,15 economic inequality is connected with the most pressing matters of our time and poses profound threats to future generations both rich and poor. Economic inequality dates back to the beginning of human civilization.16 But around “a third of income inequality in the world today” can be traced directly to European colonial expansionism.17 From the 15th century onward, prominent Western countries used imperialism, colonialism, and slavery to exploit the labor power and resources of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific and Caribbean Islands.18 As a result parts of the Western world were able to accelerate the process of industrialization, while many colonized nations fell into poverty.19 Power imbalances between former colonizers and colonies extend into contemporary times,20 as harmful trade and financial arrangements21 continue to enable industrialized nations to extract trillions of dollars’ worth of raw materials and profits from less-developed nations each year.22 The divide between haves and have nots is further shaped by the extensive outsourcing of “environmentally and socially detrimental [jobs] to low-income nations,”23 as well as forced labor hidden within international supply chains,24 problems that sometimes turn western consumers into unwitting accomplices in perpetuating economic inequalities. Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, two of the least economically secure countries in the world, provide striking illustrations of how past exploitation has created long-lasting inequalit ... News Release: Contemporary Economic Inequality Submitted on: February 03, 2026 10:41:51 AM Submitted by: IndependentPress On behalf of: www.independentpress.com |