Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A long but must read piece by Göran Therborn

The top 1% own 48% of global personal wealth Inequality and exploitation? "It's been always like that." "We can't do anything about it." "These people are wealth creators." "There is still progress. We live better today than 50 or 60 years ago." "After all, liberal democracy is spreading all over the world." "What's the alternative?"

Hickel goes against the grain, but wants to correct and better manage capitalism with modest solutions. Yet I think the book is worth reading. The Divide:  A brief guide to global inequality and its solutions

"Western liberals were widely perceived as ‘false friends’, as Conor Cruise O’Brien reported from Africa in the 1960s, and liberalism itself as an ‘ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs’. Distrust of the Western discourse of human rights was likewise constant and deep. The Indonesian thinker Soedjatmoko challenged its presumption of universal morality, pointing to the global inequalities perpetuated by the champions of human rights. Arundhati Roy spoke in 2004 of an ‘alarming shift of paradigm’: ‘Even among the well-intentioned, the expansive, magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of “human rights”’ – a minimalist request, basically, not to be killed, tortured or unjustly imprisoned. As a result, she argued ‘resistance movements in poor countries … view human rights NGOs as modern-day missionaries,’ complicit in the West’s attempt to impose an ‘unjust politica...

Aerial photographs 

In a recent article, former World Bank chief economist, Branko Milanovic reckoned there were two curses for European capital: immigration and rising inequality.   “The fact that the European Union is so prosperous and peaceful, compared both to its Eastern neighbors (Ukraine, Moldova, the Balkans, Turkey) and more importantly compared to the Middle East and Africa means that it is an excellent emigration destination. Not only is the income gap between the “core” Europe of the former EU15 and the Middle East and Africa huge, it has grown. Today, West European GDP per capita is just shy of $40,000 international dollars; sub-Saharan’s GDP per capita is $3,500 (the gap of about 11 to 1). In 1970, Western Europe’s GDP per capita was $18,000, sub-Saharan, $2,600 (the gap of 7 to 1). Since people in Africa can multiply their incomes by ten times by migrating to Europe, it is hardly surprising that, despite all the obstacles that Europe has recently began placing in the way of the mi...

Carney, Bowles and Varoufakis

The wealth of nations

On Michael Roberts' blog