Matthew Thomas Clement writes: >>> ....Furthermore, take China out of this >>> equation, and it already shows that [global] income has become more >>> unevenly >>> distributed over time [since 1970], not less...
Brad DeLong wrote: >> So that if we don't count the 1/5 of the world that has converged, we >> have divergence in global income levels? >> >> How is this different from "if we don't count the poor, we are all rich"? Doug Henwood wrote: > Using countries as the units of comparison is pretty misleading. Though > average Chinese incomes have risen dramatically, the gap between rich and > poor Chinese has expanded dramatically. What's the net impact of that on > global inequality? Not easy to tell, really. Milanovic has tried mixing > country and household data to come up with some sense of global income > distribution, and he shows rising inequality. I think that the use of countries as the units of comparison is not only misleading but outdated. This use fits with the focus of USSR-style socialism (mostly now gone), social democracy (ditto), and other nation-state-oriented capitalisms (mostly the US before the 1970s) along with old-fashioned "nation-exploits-nation" dependency theory. Though none of these systems are totally gone and though that vision is not totally obsolete, it looks as if we've seen globalization more and more creating "one big country." As Thomas Friedman says, "the world is flat," at least on the "horizontal" dimension of competition among countries. But it's only flat within classes, ignoring the "vertical" dimension within countries: my impression is that there are widening gaps between classes within almost all of the countries of the world (except for those with some welfare state left or those that haven't been integrated into the world system much). And at the same time that the bureaucratic relations and competition within the capitalist class have made that class into a more unified phenomenon, there's more and more competition among workers of different nations. It looks more and more as if the old bearded guy was right: the development of capitalism is creating a world ruling class (the capitalists) and a world proletariat. Of course, the latter is hardly a class "for itself" at this point. The former is much more organized, as usual. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
