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Geographies of Inequality - Blok 1 & 2L1 - Introduction
Milanovic (2013) -> 3 concepts of global inequality.
1. BBP vs. BBP;
2. Number of population;
3. Person vs. person.
Environmental inequality = the burden of climate change is unequally divided
between world regions. Race related, not just based on income.
Geographical toolkit
- Space, place and scale;
- Socio-spatial processes;
- Relational/linear/teleological.
Places = locations + locales + sense of places (=relational).
Reid-Henry, S. (2015). The Political Origins of Inequality: Why a More Equal
World is Better for Us All. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 15-44
Globalization and development
The more the world is subject to global forces, the less it seems that we know what
to do about them. We have allowed politicians and other powerful elite to locate the
causes of the problems elsewhere. Holding globalization itself responsible diverts
attention from specific policies and practices.
- We no longer question what ‘the forces of globalization’ actually are or
whether they might be organized more fairly, National and local politics
should have something to say about what globalization is and what it does.
- Corporations, NGO, etc. fill the gap with poverty reduction innovations.
Poverty is a product of power. Poverty is a power that some wield over others. Our
development stands in the way of their development.
- The geography of poverty is changing.
- Geography is changing in a way that increases inequality.
- Shift to middle-income countries.
- Poverty is not the lack of development, but the product of uneven rules. It
is a problem of past political decisions.
Social structures and norms justify and enable the accumulation of capital. Some
rights and freedoms are profitable and met by the market, some are not.
- Poverty is central to the organization of capitalism as a system and the
production of wealth.
- Wealth is a claim to running the system.
Economic growth and political inequality
Uneven development is not caused by poverty, but by the enrichment of some parts
at the expense of others under colonialism.
- Inequality within nations is growing rapidly.
,Geographies of Inequality - Blok 1 & 2
- Poverty tears the social fabric, effects are felt in a wider structure of
inequality. Increasing because the rich are pulling away, caused by
corruption.
When inequality reaches a certain level, it undermines economic growth. Inequality
is measured in different ways, even bigger when we compare person to person.
- Inequality has a negative impact on social mobility.
- Inequality in rich and poor countries manifests in different ways. Vertical
problem of class or horizontal problem of ethnicity.
- New global middle class will not stop inequality from growing at the
extremes. The rich world's middle class have lost to globalization.
Geography of barriers and fences due to geography of international migration.
Gradual fencing-in of the rich world because of laissez-faire, neoliberal economics.
Rich seek to confine the problems of inequality to other places and people.
- Emergent barriers are one of the reasons the world is so unequal.
- Diseases of globalization are diseases of inequality.
The past and other countries
Inequality is the product of untrammeled freedom without responsibility. And takes
away more from our societies than it gives back to individuals. Inequality thrives in
an untrusting world.
- Distancing effect -> global underclass are described as they were living in
the past.
- Problem of poverty needs acknowledgment that it is also a problem of the
rich.
- Development industry is professionalized and technocratic. Obscures the
historical responsibility for colonialism. Global inequality is addressed by
political disposition, challenging the privileges of the rich instead of the
habits of the poor.
- Global poverty had less to do with market failures, more with exploitation
of markets by the powerful.
- Language of inequality + inequality of the mind.
- Political origins of inequality are found in the relationship between wealth
and want.
L2 - Imperialism and the formation of the developing world
Age of diminished expectations
- Democracy and capitalism do not work well together. Not in line with post
cold war expectations. Global capitalism has escaped the bounds of the
post war mixed economy.
- Results: economic inequality + instability + loss of faith in democracy.
- Polycrisis equals the return of geopolitics.
Current debates
- Neoliberalism allows capitalism.
- Fordism tames capitalism via the welfare state.
,Geographies of Inequality - Blok 1 & 2
- Or: move beyond capitalism and surge into socialism or communism.
Before WOI there was classical liberalism under a laissez-faire system of the free
market.
- No controls on private capital, speculation and trade.
- This caused the great depression -> weakening of parliamentary
democracy -> fascist backlash.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944) -> market forces taken to an
extreme destroy democracy and a functioning economy. The crisis of capitalism
leads to facism instead of universal revolt.
- Double movement = when markets become disembedded from society and
create social dislocations, people revolt. WOII and the great depression are
a logical culmination of market forces overwhelming society.
- De-commodiciation = a person can maintain a life without relying on the
whims of the market. Reduce dependence on market forces, by:
- Certain standard of living regardless of levels of demand in labor
markets.
- Making goods and services available as rights from social
citizenship.
Fordism & ‘trente glorieuse’ -> post-war golden era, a more egalitarian form of
capitalism due to the strong democratic state of labor movements.
- Fordism = regime.
- Organization of production and consumption.
- Organization of labor and industrial relations.
- Regular sharing out of productivity going to profit and wages, set
of institutionalized compromises between government and unions.
- Welfare state so everyone who cannot make a living can remain a
consumer = Keynesian demand management.
John Maynard Keynes -> The government should regulate economic growth,
because unfettered markets are dangerous.
- Creating social safety nets as a reaction to the great depression.
- Bretton Woods (=embedded liberalism).
- From worker to citizen. Response to conscription and suffering ->
extension of suffrage.
- Care from cradle to the grave became an objective -> the universalization
of social security provisions after WOII.
Capital & Labour -> Class relations.
- SER = Standard employment relationship. Only for a minority of workers.
Typically male and from majority ethnic groups.
- Regulatory architecture built upon employment.
- Standardized working time.
- Continuous employment.
- Managing the margins = using migration as a safety valve to manage the
cost of labor.
, Geographies of Inequality - Blok 1 & 2
- Neoliberal revolution tore apart the social architecture of SER!
- Now: pervasive inequalities in a crisis-ridden order.
- Liberal technocracy or authoritarian populism as a solution?
Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore (2017) A History of the World in Seven Cheap
Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet.
University of California Press. Pp. 13-52 (Introduction) and pp. 138-159
(Chapter 5: Cheap Food)
State shift = fundamental turning point in life of the biospheric system. We need an
intellectual state shift during the Anthropocene. People can’t imagine the end of
capitalism.
Capitalocene since 1400’s. Understanding capitalism as a way of organizing the
relations between humans and the rest of nature, not just an economic system.
Modern world has been made through seven cheap things: nature, money, work,
care, food, energy and lives.
- Cheapening is a set of strategies to control a wiber web of life.
- The rule of Cheap Live, acts of chauvinism against categories of animal
and human lives, have made the other six cheap things possible.
- Cheapening is not natural, but a specific interaction between humans, the
biological and the physical world.
The little ice age caused the failure of feudalism. Climate change affected the
carrying capacity, aka the number of people who could be sustained on the land.
Carrying capacity changes depending on who rules, the issue was one of power.
- Feudalism exhausted its agro ecological relations. Depended on a growing
population to produce food and reproduce lordly power.
- Capitalism emerged from the end of feudalism. Ruling classes tried to
restore and expand the surplus.
Early modern colonialism used frontiers, those were payoff of wars and colonial
profit. Frontiers became an organizing principle of metropolitan wealth.
- Plantation was the original factory. See: relationship between humans,
plants and capital, plus division of labor.
- Frontier is a site where crises encourage new strategies for profit.
Capitalism reinvents itself through crisis.
- Frontiers are the encounter zones between capital, nature and humans.
They are always about reducing the costs of doing business.
- Capitalism exists only through frontiers, expanding and transforming socio
ecological relations and series of exchanges.
- Frontiers are sites where power is exercised. States use violence, culture
and knowledge to mobilize nature at low cost.
Capitalism thrives because it is productive, not only destructive and violent.
Capitalism puts nature to work, as cheaply as possible. Reproducing life within the
cash nexus is expensive.
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