As a backdrop, there's also the individual differences.
We should not forget that.
There will be variations in effort, variations in capacities, variations in
luck, which will create a level of inequality in any society.
And then finally,
public policies shape these inequalities. Does the state
meet basic needs? Does the state truly ensure education
for all children? Is the educational quality that
is accessed by the poor up to the job of providing a base
for social mobility, or is the education access by the
poor so poor that the poor get stuck in an inter-generational
cycle of poverty? All over the world, the indigenous
populations, meaning populations that were the first arrivals
in a particular location maybe arriving in, in a location even
10, 20, 30,000 years ago and then subsequently
facing later migrations like the Native Americans facing
the inflow of Europeans after Columbus's arrival.
You see, whether it's in the U.S. with the Native Americans, Canada with
the First Nations, Australia with its Aboriginal
population, New Zealand with its Maori population,
Malaysia with its Orang Asli population, and the
name given to various indigenous tribes,
a rather remarkable consistency
of major social discrimination, a
remarkable extent of poverty social,
cultural exclusion.
And usually a legacy of rather brutal state policy as well.
State policy that uprooted populations, that pushed populations into
forest regions or mountain regions or desert regions as enclaves.
One of the big mistakes that we make, often by the way
in naivete is to see a an indigenous
group inhabiting a very fragile environment.
For example, an extreme dry region of a country.
And you read the tour book and it says that the tradition of such and such tribe
is life in this near-desert region.
And, very often, that's a nonsense to
say that's a cultural phenomenon, or a tradition.
More typically what's happened is that that group has faced massive
dislocation and displacement and so, maybe this group was in the most fertile
lands before, but then when the later waves of migration
came and more powerful successor rulers in
the region came, these discriminated groups were physically
pushed into isolated areas in the forests, in the mountains, in the deserts.
And then, to justify that in a naive way the life in those extremely difficult
regions is described as the cultural tradition of the group in question.
The poverty rates of indigenous populations is very, very high around the
world, and it's not a small part of the overall global extreme poverty.