Inequality and a global pandemic: the perfect storm?

An article in the Financial Times, “This is how class wars start”, contrasts how rich Americans solve the first world problems caused by the pandemic, with summer camps costing several thousand dollars to give parents time away from their children, or very expensive private classes at home, while growing numbers of the 40% of the population who live in rented accommodation are facing eviction.

The combination of growing inequality and the pandemic now threatens to tear our societies apart: Amazon and Facebook founders Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are among the wealthiest of the approximately 640 multi-billionaires in the United States who collectively saw an increase of more than $713 billion in their fortunes in the four months following the lockdown that began in mid-March.

During that same four-month period, some 154,000 Americans died from coronavirus, and 50 million lost their jobs. One in 10 Americans surveyed in early July said they didn’t have enough to eat, and four in 10 people living in rented accommodation said they had trouble making their payments.

As the Financial Times says, citing a phrase commonly attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “when people have nothing else to eat, they will eat the rich.” Capitalist societies, which already had a tendency to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, have seen the development of technology increase inequality to unprecedented limits, not so much because of the abilities of billionaires to amass wealth or to create a minimally comparable level of wealth for society, but fundamentally because of the absence of policies that rationalize limitless accumulation.

In countries like Chile, which has doggedly pursued the policies of the Chicago School, the government finally seems to be realizing that the long-standing social unrest there over growing inequality are not going to go away and that measures to address the huge income gap will be needed.

In poorer places, like Bangladesh, where a quarter of the country was recently flooded, a harsh paradox is also being played out: those who suffer most from the effects of the climate emergency are precisely those who contribute least to it. This is not bad luck, or about working harder: it is a structural problem. If governments can’t or won’t administrate to provide a fair chance for all, why should we respect the rules of society?

The near future will be characterized by more and more natural disasters, which affect the poorest hardest, while the development of technology continues to increase inequality. Migration forced by weather, higher unemployment due to increasing automation, scarcity of resources due to the unviability of certain crops… under these conditions, a scenario of growing inequality becomes the greatest threat to human civilization.

Think about it. None of the links I have used come from publications that could be described as left-leaning: the Financial Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal or the MIT Tech Review, and this article was written by a professor at a business school, rather than some dangerous radical activist. If we can’t agree that inequality needs to be addressed out of solidarity, then perhaps our survival instinct will motivate us. Because unless we do something about inequality on a global and local scale, we’re going nowhere.

(En español, aquí)