‘We are the 99 per cent!’ Many of us who have applauded those stirring words, beginning with the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, knew that the number was not precise, and was never intended to be. The slogan did not arise because someone calculated that 99 per cent was more accurate than 92 per cent or 85 per cent or 66 per cent. It arose because it seemed to capture the grossness of a prevailing inequality. The problem is that a global perspective almost reverses the figure. At the level of the planet as a whole, Londoners and New Yorkers and Sydneysiders who proclaim ‘We are the 99 per cent’ are in fact much more likely to belong if not to the 1 per cent, then certainly to the top 10 per cent.
Innumerable observers have noted that the so-called developed world accounts for a disproportionate share of the world’s resources. The rich in global terms are relatively few in number, but they punch above their population weight in terms of consumption of goods and services, as well as the production of toxic wastes. Internationally speaking, the official statistics on mortality rates and childhood malnourishment are similarly out of whack. As the economist Branko Milanovic has been insisting for decades, inequality within nations, bad as it is, pales in comparison with inequality between nations.
Yet even those of us who find global inequality troubling and ultimately indefensible hesitate to raise the subject. Mostly because things being how they are, talking about it doesn’t seem to do any good. The economy is supranational, while even at its best, politics seems restricted to the scale of the nation. Even where free and fair
— source aeon.co | Bruce Robbins