The following quotation from Charles Kenny‘s latest Bloomberg Businessweek op-ed (not yet posted online) is valuable for more than just its confirmation of George Cleveland‘s recent comments about extreme poverty:
On Feb. 29 the World Bank announced that the proportion of the planet’s population living in absolute poverty — on less than $1.25 a day — had halved from 1990 to 2010. That rate of poverty reduction is unprecedented, diven by rapid rates of economic growth in poor countries from China to Ghana. Yet despite the huge progress against poverty worldwide, inequality — the gap between rich and poor within countries — has been expanding. Recent analysis by economists Isabel Ortiz and Matthew Cummins at Unicef suggests about two-thirds of all countries have become more unequal over the past two decades.
Income inequality has become a preoccupation of voters in America and Europe, where the poverty line is more than 10 times higher than the $1.25-a-day standard used by international organizations. Governments in the U.S. and U.K. have proposed a range of measures targeting the incomes of the top 1 percent of earners, from limits on executive bonuses to the Buffett Rule, which would require Americans making more than $1 million to pay at least 30 percent in federal income tax. Yet the example of all those rapidly growing poor countries suggests that the developed world’s emphasis on soaking the rich is misplaced — or at least inadequate. To make real progress in closing the gap between rich and poor, countries like the U.S. would be better off lifting the quality of life for their least advantaged citizens — and stopping the obsession with lowering the boom on the most privileged.
