Branko Milanovic — Notes on Frantz Fanon

I have mentioned Fanon before and commend Branko for bringing him into the conversation. It is all too easy to dismiss important figures in the past because they turned out to be "wrong" in some respects, or their message is not palatable. 

However, the world is still dealing with imperialism and colonialism as they have morphed into neo-imperialism and neocolonialism, and although conditions today are quite different in many respects, the are similarities is only due to collective memory that leads to hysteresis and path dependence. In a very real sense the people that occupy the seats of power change only in name but not much else.

The claim that capitalism has lifted all boats is true statistically but the reality is not all that much different when the distance between the top and bottom is taken into consideration. Those at the top today live in a way that the most powerful monarchs and dictators of the past could not even dream of, while those at the bottom are still destitute and many are even worse off after the commons on which they depended is privatized.

So while Fanon, like Marx and many others, may be dated, they still have something to say to us, like how far we still need to go.

Global Inequality
Notes on Frantz Fanon
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace