Todd Landman, opendemocracy, 03 May 2016

The publication of Thomas
Piketty’s Capital
in the 21st Century heralded a new age of engagement with the
problem of inequality. Unlike previous work on inequality, Piketty
turned his economic gaze away from developing countries and focused
instead on patterns of income and wealth concentration in the
developed economies of the United States and Europe. 
He argues that
inequality matters for the long-term economic health of countries. 
But what about the consequences of inequality that reach beyond the
economy?

Though Philip
Alston argues that extreme inequality is the very antithesis of
human rights, one strand in economic theory has long argued that some
inequality is not only good, but also necessary for development:
concentration of income provides the needed capital for investment in
businesses and jobs. This line of argument also holds that a period
of increasing inequality is temporary and will ease with time as a
country develops, and subsequently, income distribution becomes more
equal.  This argument and the policies that supported it
characterised much of development economics from the 1970s and the
so-called “Washington Consensus” on the need for developing
countries to allow price mechanisms
to allocate resources in their economies.


The period of so-called
Reaganomics or “voodoo” economics (a la Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off) in the 1980s took this argument and applied
it to already developed economies such as the US and the UK, where
marginal tax rates were slashed and the promise of “trickle down”
benefits would create new businesses and jobs.  Analysis of tax
returns data, long-term income and wealth data, and new
data visualisation on income inequality in the United States
shows that the policies set out in the Reagan period have by and
large continued, and that income inequality is now much worse than in
the years just before the Great Depression. 
Remarkably, the top
quintile of wealthy Americans own 84% of all income, a figure
that is not dissimilar to those found in the other advanced economies
analysed by Piketty, and a figure that remains largely
unknown to most Americans.


As America is in an
election year, the topic of inequality is at the forefront of the
campaign. Bernie Sanders has made it a
pillar of his campaign and seeks redress through a new programme
of redistribution that harks back to the days of FDR, while Hillary
Clinton speaks of “breaking
down barriers” that have held the middle and working classes
back from a decent and expected lifestyle. 
Republicans are not
addressing the issue as openly as the Democrats, but late last
summer, Donald Trump
claimed that wealthy Americans would need to pay more tax, while
middle class Americans should have a tax cut.


How does this rising and
persistent inequality in advanced economies affect the protection of
human rights? As Radhika
Balakrishnan and James Heintz noted earlier in this debate,
inequality threatens all rights, not just economic and social rights. 
In 2009, Marco Larizza (now at the World Bank) and I published a
study in International Studies Quarterly, which showed that high
levels of income and land inequality are related to high levels in
the violation of personal integrity rights.  Our paper was
inspired by patterns of inequality and human rights abuse observed in
the case of Brazil, which we then generalised across a pooled
cross-section time-series data set of 162 countries for the period
1980 to 2004. 
Our argument centred on the micro-foundations for
inequality in which the “haves” in society have incentives to
maintain the status quo. They welcome government polices that
maintain control of the resources that they have and prevent access
for those “have nots” in society—prevention
policies that may well include the violation of human rights.


In addition to the
statistically significant relationship between inequality and human
rights that we found, we argued further that the marginal effects of
inequality are quite substantial both in absolute terms and relative
to the other factors that we considered (e.g., democracy, ethnic
fragmentation, domestic conflict, population size and economic
development). In other words, redistribution of income can lead to
improvements in the protection of human rights. Conversely, an
increase in inequality can lead to a decrease in the protection of
human rights.

Just as the problem of
inequality has now travelled to the developed world, I am
increasingly concerned that its relationship with the violation of
human rights has also arrived. 
It is less common to speak of human
rights abuse in the United States and other advanced industrial
countries (for an exception see Foweraker
and Krznaric) but consider a few stylised facts that sit
alongside those already known about the increase in income
inequality. 
The US has the highest incarceration rates in the world
as a proportion of its total population (>700
per 100,000 people), where the increase in rates over time maps
precisely the rise in income inequality. Over the last 40 years the
total
prison population has quintupled. 
Prison sentences in themselves
are not human rights violations, but it is telling that policy
changes that have led to the increase in incarceration rates (and not
an increase in crime rates) coincide with policy changes that have
led to concentrations of income.

Alongside the rising rate
of incarceration, there has also been an increase in the number
of police killings in the United States an increase
in arrest-related deaths, and increasing concern
over the militarization of US police forces. 
More worryingly,
across both measures of incarceration and police killings, secondary
analysis also shows that a disproportionate number of prisoners and
victims of police shootings are African American, while data for 2015
confirm that the pattern of disproportionate
killing continues unabated.


The consequences of
inequality are not just confined to the economic realm. 
As resources
become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few, there are
strong incentives for those in positions of societal and governmental
power to maintain the status quo. 
Mobilization against such measures
and social dislocations that result from them are met with greater
incarceration, greater firepower, and sadly, more state violence
against those that are most marginalised in society. 
The lessons of
Piketty are clear for the economy, but we must also remain mindful of
the human rights consequences of inequality, and work to mitigate its
worst effects.