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global inequality
As the Year Ends, What Did We Choose to Fund?
Cancer and other noncommunicable diseases remain chronically underfunded in low- and middle-income countries. This neglect is not only unjust; it is destabilizing.
Dec 28, 2025
As the year draws to a close, I find myself thinking about what lingers after the headlines fade.
I am thinking about the corridors of a cancer conference in Tunisia, where doctors, nurses, scientists, students, and patients from across Africa gathered with a shared purpose: to reduce the burden of cancer in places too often overlooked. In conversation after conversation, I heard stories of ingenuity and quiet endurance; clinicians delivering chemotherapy with limited supplies, researchers building cancer registries on borrowed computers, patients selling what little they own to stay alive.
One young oncologist from Rwanda told me he is learning to speak differently with his patients about cancer. Not just about treatment protocols, but about fear, dignity, and hope. He explained how language itself can heal, how empathy can ease suffering even when resources are scarce. I called him the prophet—not because he predicted outcomes, but because he understood that healing begins with trust.
A breast cancer survivor from Gaza spoke of women forced to leave home in search of treatment, only to face drug shortages and fractured care across borders. Their struggle is not only against disease, but against politics and geography that interrupt therapy and shorten lives.
If the year ahead is to mean progress, it will depend on whether we choose to align wealth with wisdom and urgency with solidarity.
These stories stayed with me when I returned home; and when I read, almost casually, about tens of millions of dollars spent to influence a single political race in New York City. I could not stop doing the math. How many nurses could that money train? How many pathology labs could it equip? How many mothers could it help live long enough to watch their children grow?
We live in a moment when the science to dramatically reduce cancer and other noncommunicable diseases already exists. Prevention works. Diagnostics work. Treatment works. Yet survival remains a cruel lottery of birth. A child with leukemia in Boston, Heidelberg, or Tokyo has more than an 80% chance of survival. The same child in Kampala, Dhaka, Sana’a, or Gaza faces odds closer to 20%; not because science has failed, but because access has.
This inequity is not academic for me. I am living with stage IV cancer. My treatment is possible not because I am exceptional, but because of where I live. My ZIP code granted me specialists, hospitals, and medicines that millions of people around the world cannot access. In an era of breathtaking biomedical progress, this disparity is increasingly difficult to defend.
Meanwhile, vast sums continue to flow effortlessly toward political influence, luxury consumption, and fleeting spectacle; multimillion-dollar celebrations, couture collections, brief trips to the edge of space. Excess has always existed, and it always will. The question is not whether extravagance can be eliminated, but whether it must remain our highest expression of success.
History shows us another option. Coordinated global investment transformed the trajectory of HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. Millions of lives were saved not because the science was perfect, but because resources were mobilized with urgency and moral clarity. When funding aligns with purpose, outcomes change—quickly and dramatically.
Yet cancer and other noncommunicable diseases, now responsible for most deaths worldwide, remain chronically underfunded in low- and middle-income countries. This neglect is not only unjust; it is destabilizing. Untreated cancer weakens families, strains health systems, and erodes trust in institutions. The consequences ripple far beyond individual patients.
As the year ends, it is worth asking what our spending reveals about our values. Conferences like the one I attended in Tunisia are not only scientific gatherings; they are moral ones. They confront us with the gap between what is possible and what we choose to prioritize.
We live in a world of abundance and absence, sometimes within the same news cycle. One story celebrates money deployed for influence; another recounts lives lost for lack of basic medicine. These are not separate realities. They are the result of collective choices.
As the new year begins, we will make choices—about budgets, priorities, and what we choose to celebrate. Those choices will determine who receives care and who waits, who lives and who is left behind. Science has already shown us what is possible. If the year ahead is to mean progress, it will depend on whether we choose to align wealth with wisdom and urgency with solidarity, deciding, at last, that saving lives deserves the same resolve we devote to influence, attention, and prestige.
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Global Inequality Robbing Millions of Children of 'What It Is to be a Child'
'Before they draw their first breath, the life chances of poor and excluded children are often being shaped by inequities,' says UNICEF
Jun 28, 2016
Global inequality--"a vicious cycle of disadvantage"--threatens the lives and futures of tens of millions of children around the world, according to a new report from UNICEF.
The annual State of the World's Children report, released Tuesday, warns that unless serious steps are taken to narrow the gap between the rich and poor, 69 million children under five will die from mostly preventable causes, 167 million children will live in poverty, and 750 million women will have been married as children by 2030.
"Taken together, these deprivations effectively cut childhood short, robbing millions of children of the very things that define what it is to be a child: play, laughter, growth and learning."
--UNICEF
"As we look around the world today, we're confronted with an uncomfortable but undeniable truth: Millions of children's lives are blighted for no other reason than the country, the community, the gender, or the circumstances into which they are born," UNICEF executive director Anthony Lake writes in his introduction to the report (pdf).
"Before they draw their first breath," he continues, "the life chances of poor and excluded children are often being shaped by inequities. Disadvantage and discrimination against their communities and families will help determine whether they live or die, whether they have a chance to learn and later earn a decent living. Conflicts, crises and climate-related disasters deepen their deprivation and diminish their potential."
Nowhere is the situation "grimmer" than in sub-Saharan Africa, the report finds, where at least 247 million children--or 2 in 3--live in multidimensional poverty. By 2030, fully 9 out of 10 children in this region will be living in extreme poverty.
As UNICEF notes, poverty is about more than money, "[f]or children and adolescents. They experience it in the form of deprivations that affect multiple aspects of their lives--including their chances of attending school, being well nourished, and having access to health care, safe drinking water, and sanitation.
"Taken together," the report reads, "these deprivations effectively cut childhood short, robbing millions of children of the very things that define what it is to be a child: play, laughter, growth, and learning."
Coming less than a year after world governments signed onto 17 Sustainable Development Goals that aim to " leave no one behind," the findings are "another example of where the gap between the rhetoric of leaving no one behind, and the reality of what donors and governments do is very, very stark," lead report author Kevin Watkins told the Guardian.
"The truth is that governments have signed up to these commitments on leaving no one behind with absolutely no intention, for the most part, of doing anything that will promote the interests of those left behind," he said. "The challenge really is how do we use this new framing, the 'no one left behind' language...to galvanize the movement that can push governments to deliver."
Among UNICEF's recommendations to tackle the crisis are increased investment in vaccines, insecticide-treated mosquito nets, and nutritional supplements for the most excluded children and communities; cash transfers that enable children to stay in school longer; and "an integrated approach to development and humanitarian action" that recognizes the overlapping nature of global crises.
As Lake says in his introduction: "Inequity is not inevitable. Inequality is a choice. Promoting equity--a fair chance for every child, for all children--is also a choice. A choice we can make and must make."
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Robin Hood in Reverse: Climate Change Takes from Poor, Gives to Rich
A new study finds that climate change is triggering a massive reallocation of resources to the world's wealthiest countries
Feb 24, 2016
A warming climate is exacerbating global inequality by pushing critical natural resources, such as fish stocks, away from impoverished equatorial regions and making them more exploitable by the wealthy, according to a study released on Wednesday.
While the gap between the rich and poor in the U.S. and worldwide has expanded at a mind-boggling pace in recent decades, the new study, designed by scientists at Princeton, Rutgers, Yale, and Arizona State, shows that the frightening speed with which the globe is warming will only compound the economic trend.
The study looked specifically at fish to better understand the phenomenon.
"We tend to think of climate change as just a problem of physics and biology," Malin Pinsky, professor of ecology and evolution at Rutgers, explained to Rutgers Today. "But people react to climate change as well, and at the moment, we don't understand the impacts of human behavior on natural resources affected by climate change."
To examine those impacts, Pinsky told the newspaper that "[w]hat we find is that natural resources like fish are being pushed around by climate change and that changes who gets access to them."
The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, looked at what the authors call "inclusive wealth," or the "sum of a community's capital assets."
Rutgers Today reports that the researchers examined natural resources such as fish and forests, a community's infrastructure—buildings, roads, factories—and its population's education level and health.
The newspaper wrote:
Pinsky reports that the stronger and more conservation-oriented a community's natural resource management, the higher the value it places on its natural resources, whether those resources are increasing or diminishing. If wealthier communities and countries are more likely to have strong resource management, these wealthy groups are more likely to benefit, thus exacerbating inequality.
The study used data collected by Pinsky in his studies of fish migration and applied a mathematical formula created by Yale University economist Eli Fenichel to illustrate the connection between the migration of natural resources and the migration of wealth. The scientists created two fictitious fishery-dependent communities, Northport and Southport, and used Fenichel's formula to examine future interactions between them and their fish stocks.
The findings also echo the changes and depletion reported by commercial and Indigenous fisheries worldwide.
The researchers observed that "a changing climate can reallocate natural capital, change the value of all forms of capital, and lead to mass redistribution of wealth."
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Robin Hood in Reverse: How Hotter Planet Takes from Poor, Gives to Rich
Global warming 'is essentially a massive transfer of value from the hot parts of the world to the cooler parts of the world,' says UC Berkeley researcher
Oct 22, 2015
Ever-increasing temperatures and unmitigated climate change will worsen global inequality and widen the north-south gap between rich and poor countries, according to a groundbreaking new study published in Nature this week.
Published by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, the findings use a novel metric to show that "climate change will reshape the global economy, causing a small number of cold countries to perform better and many temperate and hot countries to perform worse."
In a fact sheet (pdf), the authors state: "On net, we project that the global economy will do much worse because of climate change, with global average incomes 23% lower in 2100 with climate change relative to without it. In addition, because some of the cooler richer countries are expected to benefit from warming and poorer tropical countries are hurt, global inequality is projected to get much worse due to climate change."
The findings are especially troubling given the latest figures from the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which on Wednesday confirmed that 2015 is on track to be the hottest year in modern human history.
The Nature study posits that global economic growth will drop sharply after temperatures pass a critical threshold of 55 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius). As average annual temperatures in individual countries tick past that mark, wealthy nations will start to see a decline in economic output, a Stanford press release explains, while poorer ones, mostly in the tropics, will suffer even steeper losses because they are already past the threshold.
"This is like taking from the poor and giving to the rich."
--Solomon Hsiang, UC Berkeley
"What climate change is doing is devaluing all the real estate south of the United States and making the whole planet less productive," study co-author Solomon Hsiang, an economist and public policy professor at UC Berkeley, told the Associated Press. "Climate change is a massive transfer of value from the hot parts of the world to the cooler parts of the world."
"This is like taking from the poor and giving to the rich," Hsiang added.
Moreover, wealth doesn't necessarily insulate rich countries from the devastation of global warming. As Stanford's statement points out, a common assumption among researchers is that wealth and technology protect rich countries from the economic impacts of climate change because they use these resources to adapt to higher temperatures.
"Under this hypothesis, the impacts of future warming should lessen over time as more countries become richer," said study co-author Mitchell Burke, professor of Earth system science at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. "But we find limited evidence that this is the case."
Burke and his fellow researchers say their findings should inform upcoming UN-brokered climate talks in Paris. They caution against relying on adaptation as a solution or strategy to deal with the climate catastrophe, noting that "our results suggest that over the last 50 years, we have not adapted much to the current climate that we are in, so we are not optimistic about the next 50 years."
Instead, the team says mitigation and how to pay for it should be at the forefront of discussions in Paris.
"Our research is important for COP21 because it suggests that these economic damages could be much larger than current estimates indicate," Burke said. "What that means for policy is that we should be willing to spend much more on mitigation than we would otherwise. The benefits of action on mitigation are much greater than we thought because the costs of inaction are much greater than we thought."
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In Leaked Draft, Pope Francis Takes 'Hard Core' Stance on Climate Debate
The Earth 'is protesting for the wrong that we are doing to her, because of the irresponsible use and abuse of the goods that God has placed on her,' pope encyclical warns
Jun 16, 2015
In a lengthy and moving letter to Roman Catholic bishops leaked on Monday, Pope Francis unequivocally asserts that "human activity" is to blame for our planet's destruction, and the only solution is for humanity to change its "lifestyle" and "consumption."
The draft encyclical, published by Italian newspaper L'Espresso on Monday, three days before its intended release, is making waves among the international community as it boldly condemns both climate-deniers and carbon credit speculation, and upholds the growing climate movement and push to divest from fossil fuels.
"Humanity is called to take note of the need for changes in lifestyle and changes in methods of production and consumption to combat this warming, or at least the human causes that produce and accentuate it," he wrote in the draft. "Numerous scientific studies indicate that the greater part of the global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases ... given off above all because of human activity."
The letter was intended for release on Thursday, ahead of the pope's scheduled address to the United Nations in September and less than six months before the upcoming UN climate change summit in Paris. On Monday evening, the Vatican condemned the early release, and reportedly asked journalists not to publish details of the draft, saying it was not the final text.
The draft letter, addressed to bishops but intended as a wider statement on Catholic doctrine, targets those who remain skeptical about the man-made causes of climate change or who believe that geoengineering schemes and other technical advances will permit industrialized nations to continue business as usual.
"The attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem, to indifference, to convenient resignation or blind faith in technical solutions," reads the text.
Translating the leaked encyclical, the Guardian reports:
At the start of the draft essay, the pope wrote, the Earth "is protesting for the wrong that we are doing to her, because of the irresponsible use and abuse of the goods that God has placed on her. We have grown up thinking that we were her owners and dominators, authorized to loot her. The violence that exists in the human heart, wounded by sin, is also manifest in the symptoms of illness that we see in the Earth, the water, the air and in living things."
He immediately makes clear, moreover, that unlike previous encyclicals, this one is directed to everyone, regardless of religion. "Faced with the global deterioration of the environment, I want to address every person who inhabits this planet," the pope wrote. "In this encyclical, I especially propose to enter into discussion with everyone regarding our common home."
According to the leaked document, the pope will praise the global ecological movement, which has "already travelled a long, rich road and has given rise to numerous groups of ordinary people that have inspired reflection".
In a surprisingly specific and unambiguous passage, the draft rejects outright "carbon credits" as a solution to the problem. It says they "could give rise to a new form of speculation and would not help to reduce the overall emission of polluting gases". On the contrary, the pope wrote, it could help "support the super-consumption of certain countries and sectors".
The encyclical is not Pope Francis's first foray into the climate debate. In a message sent to the UN Climate Convention in Peru last December, he stated that addressing climate change is a "grave ethical and moral responsibility" and warned that "the time to find global solutions is running out."
Though the climate community had expected a call to action from the pope, in addition to statement on the connection between global inequality and climate change, the draft text was seen as a very significant contribution to the climate debate.
Wow: the Pope comes out against carbon credits because they encourage speculation and over-consumption. hard core! https://t.co/YE46weCzfV
-- Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein)
June 15, 2015Keep ReadingShow Less
IMF Report Admits IMF's Obsession with Capitalism Is Killing Prosperity
"By releasing this report, the IMF has shown that 'trickle-down' economics is dead; you cannot rely on the spoils of the extremely wealthy to benefit the rest of us."
Jun 16, 2015
In light of how the International Monetary Fund has spent most of its existence parading around the world telling governments to make their economies more friendly for multinational corporations by suppressing wages, restricting pensions, liberalizing industries, and more or less advocating, they ignore the popular will of workers and the less fortunate--all in the name of market capitalism and endless economic growth--a new report released by the IMF on Monday contains an ironic warning: stop doing all that.
"This reinforces Oxfam's call on how we need to reduce the income gap between the haves and have-nots and scrutinize why the richest 10% and top 1% have so much wealth. By releasing this report, the IMF has shown that 'trickle-down' economics is dead; you cannot rely on the spoils of the extremely wealthy to benefit the rest of us."
--Nicolas Mombrial, Oxfam International
Though it perpetuates the idea that economic growth is the master to whom all should bow, the new research--conducted by the IMF's own economists and submitted under the title Causes and Consequences of Inequality (pdf)--argues that many of the policies promoted by the IMF have harmed nations by exacerbating widespread economic inequality. As many have noted, current disparities between the world's richest and poorest represent a nearly unprecedented level of global inequality, which the report describes as the "defining challenge of our time."
To strengthen economies, the report declares, nations should admit that "trickle-down" theories of wealth and prosperity do not work. Instead of those, the study recommends raising wages and living standards for the bottom 20 percent, installing more progressive tax structures, improving worker protections, and instituting policies specifically designed to bolster the middle class.
"Fighting inequality is not just an issue of fairness but an economic necessity," said Nicolas Mombrial of Oxfam International in response to the report. "And that's not Oxfam speaking, but the International Monetary Fund."
This is not the first time the IMF's research has bolstered its biggest critics' arguments. According to the International Business Times, the new analysis on inequality "echoes previous IMF research that show that redistributive policies have a positive effect on countries' economic output."
But as the Guardian's economics editor Larry Elliott notes, the new paper creates obvious "tension between the IMF's economic analysis and the more hardline policy advice" it continually gives to countries seeking foreign assistance or development funds. With Greece as the most obvious example, Elliott cites details from the report and writes:
During its negotiations with Athens, the IMF has been seeking to weaken workers' rights, but the research paper found that the easing of labor market regulations was associated with greater inequality and a boost to the incomes of the richest 10%.
"This result is consistent with forthcoming IMF work, which finds the weakening of unions is associated with a higher top 10% income share for a smaller sample of advanced economies," said the study.
"Indeed, empirical estimations using more detailed data for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries [34 of the world's richest nations] suggest that, in line with other forthcoming IMF work, more lax hiring and firing regulations, lower minimum wages relative to the median wage, and less prevalent collective bargaining and trade unions are associated with higher market inequality."
The study said there was growing evidence to suggest that rising influence of the rich and stagnant incomes of the poor and middle classes caused financial crises, hurting both short- and long-term growth.
No one should be fooled into thinking that the new research aims to alter the IMF's central commitment to advancing the financial interests of the global elite.
In fact, part of the argument presented in the paper is that such enormous levels of global economic inequality could seriously undermine the institution's public defense of capitalism's overall supremacy. "For example," the paper states, "[too much inequality] can lead to a backlash against growth-enhancing economic liberalization and fuel protectionist pressures against globalization and market-oriented reforms."
According to a recent report by Oxfam International, almost half the world's wealth is owned by one percent of the population, while the bottom half of the world's population owns the same wealth as the richest 85 people in the world. For Oxfam's Mombrial, who heads the international anti-poverty group's office in Washington D.C., the IMF's report is a welcome development that should put a nail in the coffin of the austerity-driven policies prescribed by governments and powerful financial institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and others.
"The IMF proves that making the rich richer does not work for growth, while focusing on the poor and the middle class does," Mombrial said. "This reinforces Oxfam's call on how we need to reduce the income gap between the haves and have-nots, and scrutinize why the richest 10 percent and top 1 percent have so much wealth. By releasing this report, the IMF has shown that 'trickle-down' economics is dead; you cannot rely on the spoils of the extremely wealthy to benefit the rest of us. Governments must urgently refocus their policies to close the gap between the richest and the rest if economies and societies are to grow."
As Oxfam and other international campaigners have been saying it for decades, he concluded, "The IMF has set off the alarm for governments to wake up and start actively closing the inequality gap, not just between the rich and poor, but for the middle class too. Their message to them is pretty clear: if you want growth, you'd better invest in the poor, invest in essential services and promote redistributive tax policies."
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Does Anthropocene Science Blame All Humanity?
The charge that Anthropocene scholars blame all of humanity for the actions of a small minority simply doesn’t hold water. Ecosocialists need to be positive contributors to Anthropocene discussions, not critics sniping from the sidelines.
Jun 02, 2015
According to Earth System scientists, the Earth has entered a new geological epoch that will be less stable and less hospitable to human life. Because the change is driven by human activity, the proposed name for the new epoch is Anthropocene - from the Greekanthropos, human being.
Recently, some critics have charged that the "Anthropocene narrative" blames humanity as a whole for these changes, ignoring major differences in the nature and extent of environmental change caused by different groups of people. Such concerns are understandable, but overstated - to a considerable degree, they seem to reflect preconceptions about what the Anthropocene concept might mean, rather than serious engagement with the work of the scientists who have defined it.
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It is no secret that some green theorists blame environmental problems on human beings as such. Our species has been labelled a plague, a virus, and a cancer; we've been compared to a swarm of locusts, voraciously consuming everything we see; we're told that people are nature's enemy, so only radical population reduction can prevent disaster. As Murray Bookchin wrote, Malthusian greens blame environmental crises on "a vague species called humanity - as though people of color were equatable with whites, women with men, the Third World with the First, the poor with the rich, and the exploited with their exploiters."
Given the strength of "blame people" views among some greens, it not surprising that some writers have reacted with suspicion to an epoch named for the anthropos.
- Keiran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity objects that the name identifies the cause of change as "humanity as a whole, rather than the identifiable power structures most responsible for the geological Anthropocene traces."
- Marxist historian Andreas Malm believes that those who use the word Anthropocene are attributing environmental degradation to "humans acting out their innate predispositions ... [that] some universal trait of the species must be driving the geological epoch that is its own" - and this "lets capitalism off the hook."
- Australian environmentalist Jeremy Baskin warns that "the Anthropocene label tends to universalize and normalize a small portion of humanity as 'the human of the Anthropocene'. ... Impacts which have been driven by (and largely for the benefit of) a minority are attributed to all of humanity."
It isn't surprising that such concerns have been raised, nor is it surprising that critics can find passages that support a people are the problem position: scientists are no more immune to mistaken social views than anyone else.
But what really strikes me is how little support for actual Malthusian policies can be found in scientific literature about the Anthropocene. Population growth is included as one element of the Great Acceleration, which it obviously is, but it isn't identified as the main problem, nor is population reduction promoted as the sine qua non of any effective response to global change. It's noteworthy that population is not one of the nine planetary boundaries that Anthropocene scientists have identified as critical for preventing catastrophic change in the new epoch.
There may be some hardcore Malthusians among Anthropocene scholars, but if so, they have not revealed their views in the scientific discussions to date.
In fact, scientists in the forefront of the Anthropocene project have repeatedly rejected any "all humans are to blame" narrative. The critics seem unaware of passages such as these, in the most authoritative book on the Anthropocene, Global Change and the Earth System.
"An emphasis on the population variable can have the effect of blaming the victims (as in high fertility rates among economically marginal households in the tropical world) for consequences such as tropical deforestation and famine-malnutrition. In fact, modern famine and malnutrition are more closely related to issues of food entitlements and endowments than to population growth." (p. 96)
"Population pressure and poverty have often been cited as the primary causes of tropical deforestation. However, a careful analysis of a large number of case studies across the tropics suggests that a more complex array of drivers including market and policy failures and terms of trade and debt are likely influences on the patterns and trajectories of land-use change in the tropics. As noted in one extensive review of the literature, forests fall because it is profitable to someone or some group." (p. 102)
"One quarter of the world's population remains in severe poverty. Inequality has been increasing in many countries and between countries and the interactions between poverty and the environment are of local, regional and global significance." (p. 140)
"In a world in which the disparity between the wealthy and the poor, both within and between countries, is growing, equity issues are important in any consideration of global environmental management." (p. 305)
Nor do the critics mention these passages, from a peer-reviewed article that was co-authored by sixteen of the most prominent scientists in Anthropocene studies.
"The post-2000 increase in growth rates of some non-OECD economies (e.g., China and India) is evident, but the OECD countries still accounted for about 75% of the world's economic activity. On the other hand, the non-OECD countries continue to dominate the trend in population growth. Comparing these two trends demonstrates that consumption in the OECD countries, rather than population growth in the rest of the world, has been the more important driver of change during the Great Acceleration."
"The world's wealthy countries account for 80% of the cumulative emissions of CO2 since 1751; cumulative emissions are important for climate given the long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere. The world's poorest countries with a combined population of about 800 million, have contributed less than 1% of the cumulative emissions."
Despite such clear statements, the they-blame-all-people accusations have continued. But now there is a direct response from scientists associated with the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP), the global research organization that first defined and named the Anthropocene. Rather than arguing about what was said or not said in past reports and articles, they have taken the high road, by extending their previous work to focus directly on the equity issue.
Their reply addresses what are called the Great Acceleration graphs, first published by the IGBP in 2004. They show twelve socio-economic trends and twelve Earth System trends, from 1750 to 2000. All show gradual growth, then rapid acceleration after 1950. Those iconic graphs have played a critical role in convincing most of the scientists involved that the new geological epoch began in the mid-twentieth century.
Updated versions of those graphs, extending the data to 2010, have now been published in a peer-reviewed journal, The Anthropocene Review. The lead author is Will Steffen, the former director of the IGBP who was lead author of the 2004 report in which the graphs first appeared.
No one will be surprised that the updated graphs show further acceleration of the socio-economic and Earth System trends, and no sign of the "decoupling of emissions from either energy use or economic growth" that ecomodernists and other anti-greens like to promise. Much of the article is devoted to reviewing the indicators - how they are defined, what has changed since the previous study, how the graphs relate to debates about dating the Anthropocene, and so on.
But for our discussion, what stands out is the authors' thoughtful consideration of the fact that the original graphs displayed global totals, and "did not attempt to deconstruct the socio-economic graphs into countries or groups of countries." They note that this approach has "prompted some sharp criticism from social scientists and humanities scholars" on the grounds that "strong equity issues are masked by considering global aggregates only."
True Malthusians would have defended their previous approach: as Simon Butler and I showed in Too Many People?, globally aggregated numbers that conceal significant regional, gender, national and class differences are the bedrock of populationism's debating arsenal, and partisans will not abandon them.
Instead, Steffen and his associates have accepted the criticism of the graphs as legitimate, and have gone to substantial effort to separate the socio-economic indicators into three groups: the rich OECD countries, the emerging (BRICS) nations, and the rest of the world. In addition to publishing current versions of the original aggregated graphs, they have added ten graphs that display of socio-economic indicators for the three groups of countries separately. (There was insufficient data for the other two indicators.)
In a section headed "Deconstructing the socio-economic trends: The equity issue," they draw conclusions from the dis-aggregated graphs.
"In 2010 the OECD countries accounted for 74% of global GDP but only 18% of the global population. Insofar as the imprint on the Earth System scales with consumption, most of the human imprint on the Earth System is coming from the OECD world. This points to the profound scale of global inequality, which distorts the distribution of the benefits of the Great Acceleration and confounds efforts to deal with its impacts on the Earth System. ...
"The Great Acceleration has, until very recently, been almost entirely driven by a small fraction of the human population, those in developed countries."
As we've seen, similar points have been made in previous reports and articles, but they have now been given much more prominence - moved to center stage, as it were. Steffen and his associates have clearly shown that they understand the importance of including global inequality as a key factor in any discussion of the causes and effects of Earth's transition to the Great Transition. The claim that Anthropocene scholars in general blame all of humanity for the actions of a small minority simply doesn't hold water.
Of course, ecosocialists would take the dis-aggregation farther, breaking out inequalities not just between but within countries, stressing the fact that one percent of the population owns half of the world's wealth and that inequality is growing at unprecedented rates. An ecosocialist analysis of the Great Acceleration will build on the decisive issues of class and power that are shaping the Anthropocene and will ultimately determine humanity's future.
To be effective, we have to raise that perspective as positive contributors to the Anthropocene discussions, not as critics sniping from the sidelines. Only in that way can we move towards an analysis that combines contemporary Earth System Science with ecological Marxism in the world-saving synthesis that is so desperately needed.
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World Bank 'Development' Driving--Not Solving--Inequality and Poverty
Apr 09, 2014
Our Land, Our Business (English)Right now, millions of people are being thrown off their land because large corporations are being given special rights. The World ...
The thing about "international development" is that it's a bit of a murky, catch-all term. It's got a good feel to it - if you're involved in international development, you're more often than not seen as one of the good guys. It's swirling about in a bucket of meaning alongside "foreign aid" and "disaster relief". It's about "doing good", which is about helping people improve their situation, right? It could be helping people escape from the ruins of an earthquake or the ruins of economic mismanagement but that's what "international development" is generally understood to be about.
How would you feel, then, if you could be convinced that "international development" was a term hiding something darker, less altruistic and far more self-interested? What if the people charged with leading global the development were actually doing more for the 1% than the 99%? Would that piss you off?
Then prepare to be pissed off. Because the World Bank, with its $30 billion annual budget, is doing just that, and causing misery and environmental destruction along the way.
The Bank's mission is to "[E]nd poverty within a generation and boost shared prosperity." Like almost all governments and multilateral institutions, the Bank subscribes to the current economic orthodoxy in as much as all of its models for poverty reduction have economic growth as a prerequisite. For the purposes of this argument, whether they are right or not is not is a secondary, albeit not irrelevant point. The primary point is that it is such a given that almost any sort of growth is considered positive. If it can go on a country's books as growth - in the form of GDP - it's good.
The next pillar of belief is that for developing countries to develop, they must be connected to global markets. They must be able to sell what they have to the people who want it. Oil, grain, rare earth, cotton, diamonds . . . in fact practically any natural resource, preferably in its raw form. And these days, one of the things that developing countries have that others want is arable land. Rich and powerful people aren't stupid; much as political leaders may prevaricate over climate change politically, the 1% know what's coming. They know that land - especially land connected to water - is going to become increasingly rare, and therefore increasingly valuable. It is already in huge demand, both by those looking to build industrial, often monoculture operations, and those looking to turn a quick buck by playing the market.
The thing is, practically all of the land being traded is already owned, mostly by smallholder farmers, pastoralists and Indigenous People; exactly the sort of people "international development" is supposed to be about. Unfortunately, for millions of such people, from Cambodia to Ethiopia to Guatemala, however, they don't have the right paperwork. The fact that they have been tending the same land for generations, or that they are already feeding 80% of the developing world, or that their methods are environmentally sustainable where industrial agriculture is hugely toxic, is irrelevant. No paperwork, no claim. Or, more to the point, no paperwork, therefore their land must belong to the government, and therefore it becomes visible to the world as a tradable asset.
Enter the World Bank.
Through a system called the Doing Business (DB)rankings, the Bank uses its considerable financial and political power to make it as easy as possible for these now visible and tradable assets to, well, be traded, in huge plots. And the only people with the capital to buy assets on that scale are the 1%, in the guise of foreign corporations or local elites. So the people the World Bank is helping are the 1%. But wait, you may well cry, investment brings jobs and tax revenue and expertise to a country; that is development! It would be if it did. In far to many cases, however, corporations are given tax breaks, and jobs and expertise are firstly often scant, because industrial farming is designed to operate with minimal human input, and secondly because even those few jobs that do exist are more often than not kept in a relatively closed loop of expatworkers or a handful of local people. It does do one critical thing, though. It brings more economic activity into the country than previously existed, which registers as growth. Never mind that little or none of it is actually benefits the country, as it is whisked away through tax havens as soon as it appears. It is, briefly, there. And so it seems perfectly logical to the World Bank because they are, in theory, helping developing countries connect to global markets, and thereby achieve economic - GDP - growth.
It works by technocrats in Washington awarding points to countries when they act in favor of the "ease of doing business" and then publishing an annual ranking in a report they are very proud to claim, "has served as an incomparable catalyst for business reform initiatives".In other words, reforms that service the needs of intensive, large-scale international business are rewarded and ones judged to stand in its way are punished.
For example, the fewer regulations there are on the purchase land, the higher the rating, with maximum points being awarded to countries with total freedom of purchase. More modest corporate taxation gets some reward; most points are awarded for zero corporate taxation. Countries are even punished for offering their workers minimum wages.It is the neoliberal blueprint for economic development: low corporate taxation, low worker wages and protection, maximum privatisation and minimal standards of environmental protection. Everything, in other words, to maximize wealth extraction and concentration.
The World Bank claims that the rankings are merely about minimizing bureaucracy, but even a brief look at what happens to countries as they move up and down the rankings clearly shows that they are little more than a bulldozer used to clear the path of smallholder farmers, and whatever local labor or environmental protections exist so that large western corporations or local elites can move in and start extracting the wealth of the country.
For example, in the 2012 rankings, Cameroon jumped four spots (from 165 to 161) because it made it easier to "start a business" by allowing company founders to produce only a sworn declaration instead of a hard copy of their criminal records.
Liberia was placed in the top ten DB reformers in 2008-2009 because of the measures it took (with the help of the doing Business reform advisory Team) in the areas of "starting a business," "dealing with construction permits," and "trading across borders." an improvement in the DB ranking resulted in increased FDI from including investments from palm oil giants such as the British equatorial palm Oil in 2008, Malaysian Sime Darby in 2009, and Singaporean golden agri-resources in 2010, resulting in the corporate takeover of millions of acres of land and local populations' loss of farms, resources, and livelihoods.
Sierra Leone has also been praised as a good reformer. Its DB ranking increased by 15 points between 2008 and 2010, with key steps taken in the area of "protecting investors" (up 22 points). Sierra Leone's improvements in 2008 nonetheless mainly consisted of reducing companies' tax burden and introducing flexible tax rates for investors, none of which helps Sierra Leone's citizens.
Similar stories can be told about Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Nicaragua, Senegal, Honduras and the Philippines. In all cases, the needs of ordinary people have fallen under the tracks of the World Bank's Doing Business bulldozer. Around the world, millions of people are being displaced, and their lives ruined, to help create a wealth they will ever see.
We've launched a campaign to try and get them to throw out this ranking system. The Bank has the first of two big meetings this year on April 11 - 13th. With farmers groups and civil society organizations from around the world, we're going to use that moment to introduce them to the Our Land, Our Business campaign, and then work through till the Annual Meeting in October to get as many people, from as many countries as possible to hear about this and stand with us. With lots of signatures, press activity, off line protests and social media, we believe we can generate enough critical and very public attention to force them to abolish the Doing Business system. The Bank hates bad publicity and has changed its ways because of it in the past, so we're going to give them some.
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