Kaushik Basu: Future generations would be aghast at today’s inequality
While there are many ways to measure economic inequality, key metrics consistently show that disparities are getting worse. According to a recent United Nations report, 71% of the world’s population now live in countries where inequality has increased. Unsurprisingly, this includes India and China.
A recent paper by Thomas Piketty and his co-authors shows that the income share of the top 1% in India has risen to its highest level since 1922, the earliest data that they have, when the country was still under British colonial rule. At the same time, global inequality remains extremely high. While billionaire wealth has reached unprecedented levels, the World Bank estimates that 712 million people worldwide survive on less than $2.15 per day.
Future generations will likely be shocked that we have tolerated such extreme levels of inequality, just as we are horrified by our ancestors’ acceptance of slavery. But as David Hume argued in the 18th century, moral imperatives (‘ought’) cannot be derived from objective facts (‘is’). In other words, problems like inequality cannot be resolved through science or reason alone.
Instead, we must highlight their moral implications to persuade people to act. Two key aspects of global inequality deserve particular attention. First, economic disparities are set to worsen both within and across countries.
As technological advances like artificial intelligence (AI) reduce demand for human labour, working-class households around the world could become increasingly impoverished. Meanwhile, those who own the machines and run the largest corporations are expected to amass unprecedented power and wealth. The US—home to nearly 38 million people living below the poverty line despite being one of the
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