The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

by Jason Hickel

The solution to mass poverty turns out to be remarkably simple. Poor people don’t need charity, they need fair wages for their work, labour unions to defend those wages and state regulation that prevents exploitation. They need decent public services – such as universal healthcare and education – and a progressive taxation system capable of funding them. They need fair access to land and a fair share of natural resource wealth. In other words, real development requires the redistribution of power, which then in most cases naturally precipitates a redistribution of resources. Developmentalist policies were generally brought in by democratically elected governments that had broad popular support, although a few of them – as in Egypt – calcified into authoritarian regimes. But in all cases, developmentalist governments sought to change the rules of national economies to make them fairer for the majority, so that economic systems would serve the interests of the people rather than just the interests of the national elite and foreign corporations.