The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

by Jason Hickel

When myths fall apart, revolutions happen.

In early 2014, Oxfam reported that the richest eighty-five people had come to accumulate more wealth than the poorest 50 per cent of the world’s population, or 3.6 billion people. The following year things had already become worse – and so too the year after that. And in early 2017, as the World Economic Forum met in Davos, Oxfam announced that the richest eight people had as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion.

Truman wasn’t ignorant of that history. He knew that the United States had been violently intervening in Latin American countries since the 19th century in order to secure access to the continent’s raw materials.