A Bulgarian student and kitchen worker (photo courtesy Vice)
The most wealth-equal societies in the world last year, where data were available, were Albania (Gini* 0.448), Hungary (0.453), Slovakia (0.463), Iceland (0.467) and Moldova (0.479). Some other close contenders are Croatia (0.498), Azerbaijan (0.510), Pakistan (0.526), Bulgaria (0.529), Lithuania (0.532), Tajikistan (0.535) and Serbia (0.543). It would have been interesting to see data from, for example, Belarus, which has traditionally had a strong penchant for egalitarianism – but sadly none were to be had in this study.
These data are quite troubling, but I will get to that later. I do feel fairly vindicated in being a strong, if occasionally critical, supporter of the left-conservative post-communist politics in some of these nations: Bulgaria, Moldova and Slovakia in particular. They have managed to weather the transition away from Soviet communism fairly well, keeping at least some of the old welfare and redistributive infrastructure intact and functional despite massive pressure from global capital.
That’s no mean feat. I might also credit the Byzantine-legacy institutions of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia for some of this, but I think a significant rôle might also be played by the famed Balkan intransigence. Inertia can be a great virtue, particularly among the stubborn, traditionally-Orthodox folk of Eastern and Southern Europe. They have so far obstinately managed to keep the social balance and the wealth gap from getting worse: something the squishy liberal social democrats of the West (outside Iceland, apparently – and they took some strong steps) have not done. These post-communist former Eastern Bloc countries haven’t, however, quite managed to succeed in making it better.
The alarming thing about this data set is that it’s sadly increasingly common for big post-industrial societies now to have wealth Ginis in excess of 0.800 or even 0.900, and vanishingly rare for societies to have wealth Ginis of less than 0.500. The wealth Gini in the United States last year was 0.859, making us one of the most grotesquely unequal societies on the planet. All of the inequality in this country is being powered by élites in places like Silicon Valley, Wall Street and suburban Texas. The élites do everything in their power to rig œconomic institutions in their favour, capture political systems, provoke and then profiteer on wars, quash unions, undermine family structures and even redesign entire communities to be as inhospitable as possible to the working poor.
This state-of-affairs is ridiculously unjust, of course, and the great philosophers of the ages, not to mention the Fathers of the Church, all spoke out vehemently against it. But historically speaking it’s also a recipe for a full-blown societal collapse. This kind of surreal, unnatural inequality almost always precedes the conditions for civil wars brought on by a decline in social trust, famines brought on by mismanagement and overexploitation of land resources, and disease epidemics brought on by overcrowding of cities and the degradation of urban infrastructure. Because we are facing historically-unprecedented levels of global wealth inequality, we need to be especially concerned with questions of food sovereignty and the effects of mass migration.
If we ever had a need for the intransigence, inertia and good old-fashioned inat of the working poor (and more), now is that time. The global masses face an élite class war against them on all fronts – cultural as well as œconomic. And our survival as a species may be at stake.
* The Gini coefficient is a measure of the difference in ‘area under the curve’ between a 1-to-1 linear distribution representing total equality, and the actual statistical dispersion of wealth across the population. The lower the coefficient, the more equal the society is. A Gini coefficient of 0 would be a perfectly equalitarian society in which every individual had an equal share of the population’s wealth; and a Gini coefficient of 1 represents a perfect inequality in which one person holds all of the wealth and the rest of the population none.
It’s necessary to point out that between the income Gini and the wealth Gini, the wealth Gini is the more significant figure from a viewpoint which values equity – because not all wealth is gained through earned income. The income Gini is a good measure of how well the people at the very bottom of the distribution are taken care of in comparison with the middle class: for example, how well a waitress is doing compared to a restaurant manager, who both derive their wealth from earned income. It’s also the most popularly-publicised figure, because it makes the Western European liberal democracies look good in comparison to the rest of the world. But it’s not a good measure of how well the wealth of the society is distributed overall. If you want to find out how well the waitress is doing compared to, say, an investment banker, you have to look at the wealth Gini. By definition, the wealth Gini is always higher than the income Gini.
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