The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

by Jason Hickel

They had three ideas on the list: backing for the new United Nations, resistance to the Soviet threat and continued commitment to the Marshall Plan.

give aid to Third World countries to help them develop and put an end to the scourge of grinding poverty?

The standard poverty measure counts the number of people who live on less than a dollar a day. But in many global South countries a dollar a day is simply not adequate for human existence, to say nothing of human dignity.

Indeed, the US military was invading and occupying states like Honduras and Cuba even as late as the 1920s and 1930s

It is now widely acknowledged by scholars that structural adjustment was one of the greatest single causes of poverty in the global South, after colonialism.

As Joseph Stiglitz has put it, ‘What we measure informs what we do. And if we’re measuring the wrong thing, we’re going to do the wrong thing.’