The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

by Jason Hickel

Keynesian policies created the conditions for high rates of economic growth through the 1950s and 1960s – growth that was relatively equitably shared across classes. It was a success story like none other. Of course, the system wasn’t perfect: there were many who were left out. Middle-class women, for example, remained largely confined to the home and dependent on male wages and salaries. Black people were denied fair labour contracts and access to decent schooling and housing – particularly in the United States, where the Civil Rights Movement had not yet won basic legal equality for African Americans. Gay people were routinely persecuted and marginalised. In short, the Keynesian compromise in the West worked mostly for people who conformed to a particular norm – white, male and straight. It depended to some extent on cheap labour from women and minorities, and of course was financed in large part by surplus wealth siphoned from the rest of the world through the old colonial pipelines.