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SECTION 1 2 3<br />

EXTREME INEQUALITY<br />

machines; and that technology and an increasingly globalized market have also<br />

enabled companies to shift a lot of low-skilled work to developing countries,<br />

further eroding the wages of lower-skilled workers in developed countries.<br />

The myth is that all of this drives a relentless and unavoidable increase<br />

in inequality.<br />

However, if this myth were true there would be little difference in the<br />

development of job markets in individual countries. In fact, while Germany has,<br />

to a large extent, resisted the mass export of jobs and the explosion in wealth<br />

and high salaries at the top, countries like the USA and UK have seen highlevels<br />

of erosion among mid-level jobs and huge concentrations of wealth.<br />

Similarly, Brazil has managed to benefit from globalization while reducing<br />

economic inequality, whereas other countries, such as India, have seen<br />

big increases in inequality.<br />

So, while technological change, education and globalization are important<br />

factors in the inequality story, the main explanation lies elsewhere, in<br />

deliberate policy choices, such as reducing the minimum wage, lowering<br />

taxation for the wealthy and suppressing unions. These are, in turn, based<br />

on economic policy and political ideology, not on inevitable and supposedly<br />

elemental economic forces.<br />

MYTH 7<br />

Extreme economic inequality is not the problem, extreme poverty is<br />

the problem. There is no need to focus on inequality and the growth<br />

in wealth for a few at the top, as long as poverty is being reduced for<br />

those at the bottom.<br />

This is a widely held view, that the focus of development should be confined to<br />

lifting up those at the bottom, and that any focus on the growing wealth at the<br />

top is a distraction.<br />

Extreme economic inequality not only slows the pace of poverty reduction,<br />

it can reverse it. 314 It is not possible to end poverty without focusing first on<br />

extreme economic inequality and the redistribution of wealth from those at the<br />

top to those at the bottom. On a planet with increasingly scarce resources, it is<br />

also not sustainable to have so much wealth in the hands of so few. 315 For the<br />

good of the whole world we must focus our efforts on the scourge of extreme<br />

economic inequality.<br />

67

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