Two epochal turns of inequality, their significance, and their dynamics

Göran Therborn

doi:10.1186/s40711-021-00143-0

Abstract

At the end of the twentieth century, two historical turns of economic inequality happened. Among the developed countries of the Global North, the secular trend of decreasing intra-national inequality turned into its opposite. At about the same time, the long period of global inequality began to bend down, among households as well as among nations, a turn less noticed but more significant than the reduction of extreme poverty in the South. The foundation of the former turn was the beginning of de-industrialization in the North, and the coming of a post-industrial society, very different from the one predicted. The paper analyzes the trigger of the turn and the central dynamics of the new inequality in the rich North, financialization, and the digital revolution. It then tries to answer two questions about the global turn: Was the decline of global inequality causally connected to the increase of Northern intra-national inequality? Will there be a development of industrial societies in the South? The answer to both is no. What lies ahead is more likely a global convergence of intra-national unequalization, albeit with both different and similar dynamics, as the decline of extreme poverty in the South is leading to inequality increases comparable to those of the North. Post-industrialism has no egalitarian dialectic like that of industrial capitalism, but the dynamics of the twenty-first century inequality are likely to be confronted not only with popular protest movements but also with an emergent scholarly and intellectual Egalitarian Enlightenment.

Highlights

At the end of the twentieth century, two historical turns of economic inequality happened
Economic inequality in the most developed parts of the world took a U-turn in the 1980s, from a secular direction towards declining inequality, in particular after World War II, to a path of mounting inequality
Is it the beginning of the end of human poverty? Will industrial society relocate to the South? Or is it more significantly a beginning of convergence with the North in similar tendencies of intra-national inequality as well as in international standing? Currently, the world, North and South, is moving towards ever more economic inequality

Summary

When history turned

The social landscape of human (in)equality in the early twenty-first century was shaped by major historical turns in the last decades of the previous century. This paper starts from finding two significant lacunae in the multivariate approaches They pay no or scant attention to the large-scale turn of socio-economic history involved, to the egalitarian potentialities of industrial societies, to the significance of Northern de-industrialization and arrival of post-industrial societies, and to the importance for inequality of industrial prospects in the Global South. They do not take into account the abruptness of a large-scale socio-economic change, which calls for politico-economic historical attention to triggers.

Industrial peak

The two main drivers of current inequality

Elected political elite

Findings

Latin America