Global Inequality: Possibly One of The Greatest Tragedies of 2020

The year 2020 has been a battlefield of global issues fighting for attention ranging from the COVID-19 Pandemic, a hotbed of sex trafficking scandals, and even to an explosion in Beirut destroying more than half of the city.  Possibly one of the most crucial issues at the forefront of the United States arose from the high-profile death of George Floyd: a Minneapolis resident brutally killed by a local police officer.  This death was the catalyst for the ‘Black Lives Matter’ social movement which begged the country to realize the effect of global inequality when it comes to wealth effects not only the social climate of a region, but the world as a whole. So what came first, the chicken or the egg? That is the same question one could ask when it comes to social injustice and big businesses in regards to wealth inequality.  According to Inequality.org, adults with less than $10,000 in wealth makeup 56.6% of the world’s population but hold less than 2 percent of global wealth.  This statistic brings to light the need for change and a slowing of the disproportionate distribution of wealth of individuals; The extent to which global inequality continues to grow needs action immediately not only from individuals, but established institutions. 

Obtaining wealth started off with a combination of hard work and innovative ideas in the Industrial Age, then transitioned to the gouging of poor wages to employees under terrible conditions with little to no regulations.  Very few regulations were ever put in place due to the fact that the established institutions were making a significant profit, thus generating a bustling economy within that country. Shortly following the end of the industrial revolution, and the governmental interference of new regulations, many labor based jobs were outsourced to countries that were willing to work for wages that grew individual businesses’ margins to new found highs. With better margins, businesses were able to lower the prices of their goods and make items of which were once a ‘luxury’ an obtainable good for the working class. From a business perspective, “when the wealth gap widens, the lifestyle gap shrinks” (Will, 2015, p. 2). In a perfect world, maybe this could be true. However, the wealth gap has met its capacity and the threshold for becoming wealthy in today’s society across the globe has been raised to the extent that the average person cannot succeed.  

As mentioned before, there has to be a level of inequality to inspire competition; competition of being better than another product, individual, or business else triggers improvement, which is typically the continuous goal for society.  If everything was fair and equal, it would be a stagnant market in the sense of business and there would be no need to question change.  In contrast, the hoards of the ‘rich’ are now creating a club of reinvestment and wealth that simply cannot be entered without a miracle.  Provided by Inequality.org, the United States is home to over 5,909,000 millionaires, the most in any country around the globe. ‘The Morning Edition’ published a podcast featuring Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  He noted that, “I have come to believe that the dangerous separation of the American upper middle class from the rest of society is a huge problem for politics because there's a sense of a bubble. There's a sense of people who are kind of making out pretty well from current trends and who are increasingly separate occupationally, residentially, educationally and economically from the rest of society.”  The wealth equality gap is no longer a game of keep-up, but rather taking an insurmountable toll on the structure of society as a whole.  The wealth inequality that the globe is witnessing is a dangerous road to continue on, as the death of George Floyd is just one of the first blatant examples to showcase the severity of this situation at hand.  

Works Cited

“Global Inequality.” Inequality.org, 16 July 2020, inequality.org/facts/global-inequality/.

Inskeep, Steve, and Richard Reeves. “Top 20 Percent of Americans 'Hoard the American

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31 May 2017. NPR, www.npr.org/2017/05/31/530843665/top-20-percent-of-americans-hoard-the-

american-dream. Accessed 2 Sept. 2020.

Will, George F. “How Income Inequality Benefits Everybody.” 25 Mar. 2015, pp. 1–2.