ABSTRACT

Global inequality remains a major characteristic of the contemporary world, and a fundamental political challenge for global governance. It is not that the world’s poor are up in arms against global capitalism and the system of dominant nation-states organized within the G20. It is more that persistent global inequality contributes to a wider climate of economic and social volatility, reflected in the collapsing legitimacy of economic liberalism, and a profound uncertainty about the future dynamics of the global order. High rates of attempted immigration from poor to richer countries, and resistance to austerity are two symptoms of this climate of uncertainty. Beyond this, the waning support for the Washington Consensus as an adequate development strategy based on economic deregulation and cross-border mobility of capital and labour means that the key question becomes what happens next? In this chapter I consider first some important issues in establishing what is meant by global

inequality, and why inequality matters. I then turn to a discussion of contemporary trends in global inequality, including a critical assessment of recent influential work by the French economist Thomas Piketty (2014). Is global inequality lessening or getting more extreme? And what explains the patterns that are observable? Is globalization or global capitalism, in some sense, responsible for global inequality, or is this widely held linkage too simplistic and misleading? This discussion leads into broader consideration of the dynamics of capitalism and modernity. Much of the analysis here draws on my recent study Global Inequalities (Holton 2014).