"Inequality is a national emergency." Who claims it? Not Elisabeth Warren or Berny Sanders, who are competing (along with 11 other candidates) for the Democratic nomination in the race for the White House. Both with radical programs (but that of the former is not anti-capitalist), feared by the financial markets.
Nor Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Labor UK, so rigid as to want all or nothing and unable to win the votes against Brexit, refusing to take sides. A double political suicide. Never was the name of a prophet so usurped.
Instead, he declares Ray Dalio, the Italian-American founder and leader of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund with $160 trillion (billion) under management. Dalio has a personal fortune of 18,7 billion greenbacks. A DOCG capitalist, and even a financial one. The worst of the worst, according to the rampant anti-market vulgate and the Marxian (and Gesellian) vision of the world. And if Dalio says so…
On the other hand, evidence of rising inequality within all countries (advanced and not) is galore. While, depending on the data and methods used, there are wide differences on the extent of this increase (see the last di the Economist).
Dani Rodrik, Branko Milanovic and Thomas Picketty they are some of the most famous scholars who have analyzed the increase in inequality in its determinants and consequences. The rise of sovereign and demagogic movements and politicians has relied on it.
In Italy, however, the gap between rich and poor has increased less than in other countries, because all of Italy has become impoverished. So that the absolute poor have multiplied almost threefold since 2007. They are the people who cannot buy a basket of necessary goods. That is, they do not get to have 1.027 euros a month in a metropolitan city in the North or 684 euros in a small municipality in the South, to support a family of three.
In our country their number has increased from 1,8 million in 2007 to 5 million in 2018. Of which 1,3 million minors. Before the crisis i working poor they were few, today they are widespread: 12,3% of families headed by a low-skilled employee are poor, against the national average of 7%, 3,2% among the elderly and 9,7% among families with minors.
Therefore, if by now there is broad consensus on the widening of inequality, the division becomes deep once again when we move on to the recipes for reducing it. Surely more work is needed, because it gives dignity and a social role to people. So growth is needed. All the more to fight the type of Italian poverty that was born from a degrowth that was not at all happy.
However the statistics clearly say that work is necessary but not sufficient to rebalance income distribution and reduce poverty. One can be busy and equally terribly poor.
What to do? What does history teach us? We ask the teacher of life through the medium Walter Scheidel, professor at Stanford and author of the ambitious and fascinating The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, a theme on which the 23th Reading of the Mill (which is also the Italian publisher of this book, substantially translated with the same title) was held in Bologna on 35 November.
It is doubtful that the Austrian historian knows Totò and his memorable one 'A level (it is advisable to listen to it recited by Prince De Curtis himself; it is easily traceable on youtube). However Scheidel demonstrates with a wealth of data and long historical series how the brilliant Italian actor is right in asserting that death reduces differences (actually cancels them). And he does it not only in the afterlife, as Totò admonishes, but also in earthly existence.
Scheidel, in fact, illustrates two historical facts about inequality: it is the prevailing condition; it was reduced only by violent phenomena. Why significant declines in wealth gaps have occurred as a result of: collapse of large states (for example, the Roman Empire), epidemics (the Black Death, which reduced the population by a third), large mass wars (World ) and social revolutions (the communist ones, with 100 million dead). With compelling narration, Scheidel illustrates the mechanisms by which these events reduced inequality, and we refer to his work for their description.
A strong thesis of Scheidel is that development increases inequality: how and why Angus Deaton, Nobel Prize winner 2015, masterfully explained it in another fine book published by the Mill (The great escape. Health, wealth and the origins of inequality). So development de-levels, although it is an epochal success in bringing billions of people out of misery.
Scheidel warns of another incipient source of inequality: technology that will enable some human beings to enhance sensory capabilities, mnemonic, cognitive and physical by implanting chips and others found in one's body. after theHomo sapiens,premium homo, a happy expression coined by Massimo Gaggi in an essay of the same name for Laterza.
The «what to do?» returns, appropriate and disturbing. of Lenin. It is not the task of the historian show the way to reduce inequality. Scheidel limits himself to rattle off some of the measures he debates the most but on which consensus is far from unanimous: greater progressiveness in direct taxes on income and inheritance; more education; less avoidance and evasion, also by tracing wealth in tax havens; introduction of a universal basic income; finance reform.
Certainly no one wishes for cathartic solutions like those of the past. Although it is to be feared that the looming climate catastrophe can wipe out half (or all?) of humanity; this threat is urging us to embark on new ways of development.
However, we cannot resign ourselves to accepting, just because it is historically dominant, the unheard-of poverty of so many people around us. You just need to walk a short distance from the center of Rome or Milan to see them, if you don't look the other way.
Simply inequality and poverty at current levels are socially and ethically inadmissible in advanced democracies. Especially since they are not politically sustainable: look where the electoral results from the referendum on the Brexit on!
So? On one point, Scheidel's volume does not deliver what the title seems to promise, because he does not go so far as to examine whether there is a causal relationship ranging from increasing inequality to leveling violence. There are many good reasons to believe that there is such a link.
Therefore, more today is expected to to remedy the enormous gap in wealth and to great poverty in rich countries (poverty in abundance, as John M. Keynes called it), the more the social bomb accumulates an explosive charge. His ticking is already deafening and only those who don't want to hear don't hear it. Everyone should listen to you. Especially to those who have the most to lose.
