Global inequality
The recent surge of inequality in the West has been driven by the revolution in technology, just as the Industrial Revolution drove inequality 150 years ago. Drawing on vast data sets and cutting-edge research, Milanović explains the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what policies might tilt the balance toward economic justice.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
11mentions
4people
2011–2024years
73% recommend27% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The word “Presumably” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. That Econ101 justification is harder and harder to keep up as you learn more about both economics and the real world.
For detailed counter arguments, see Branko Milanović Global inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, James Kwak Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality, Walt Bogdanich & Michael Forsythe When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm, and many other books.
- A marvelous book comparing income and wealth across centuries is The Haves and the Have-Nots - A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic.
One way to compare wealth is to see how many people's labor an individual could purchase. It differs across time and countries (labor is cheap in India currently for example). This book is a careful historic look by an economist - using evidence from literature, history, etc. Branko uses a variety of ways to compare individuals across history.
https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/branko-milanovic/the-haves...
- The fantastic book[1] The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic points out that the 3 most-important correlated determinants of financial success in life are, in order:
1. Geography (which country you're born in)
2. Parents' finances
3. Your gender
These 3 explain the vast majority of the variance in income between people. Knowing these 3 facts about a person allows you to predict their income with high accuracy (small 90% confidence interval).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Haves-Have-Nots-Idiosyncratic-History...
- A fantastic overview of poverty across the history of humanity comes in a short book: The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality Paperback by economist Branko Milanovic, in which he compares wealth and poverty across millennia.
And for a serious philosophical treatment about poverty, informed by numerous statistics comes in a long treatise World Poverty and Human Rights by philosopher Thomas W. Pogge who among other things points out the fudging of numbers by the international community. For example creating seeming amelioration of extreme world poverty by redefining malnutrition (how long it needs to persist for it to count), caloric deficit (for sedentary lifestyle rather than a hardworking farmer), redefining success (proportion of humanity rather than absolute numbers), etc. Link to relevant time in a talk by Dr. Pogge about this subject: https://youtu.be/Dsl9cyaIn-g?t=382
- I strongly recommend Branko Milanovic's book The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality as an overview of poverty across millennia.
- I think more pertinent are Economism by James Kwak (on the naive use of Econ 101), Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic (a better, or at least much more legible, analysis of inequality within and among countries than Piketty's tome), and maybe Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer (about campaign financing in the last two decades in the US).
