Zack Beauchamp — Why The World Is So Unequal — And Why It’s Getting Better

Consider two passages. The first is a brutally succinct narrative of the moral shame of our time, global poverty: “Almost a billion people still live in material destitution, millions of children still die through the accident of where they are born, and wasting and stunting still disfigure the bodies of nearly half of India’s children.”

The second tells a rather more optimistic story: “Income and health have improved almost everywhere since World War II. There is not a single country in the world where infant or child mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950.”

That these are from the same book, Princeton economist Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape, is no doubt obvious given the subject of this review. But their juxtaposition reveals the core of Deaton’s argument: humanity’s greatest moral failure is also our greatest success story. The sheer scale of our world’s horror can boggle the mind, obscuring the realness of the suffering that suffuses the globe. The death of one a tragedy, a million a statistic, as the old saying (falsely attributed to Josef Stalin) goes.

And yet, despite our still shameful levels of indifference, we have succeeded in making millions of lives immeasurably better, gains that have largely come in the last 250 years….

ThinkProgress
Why The World Is So Unequal — And Why It’s Getting Better
Zack Beauchamp