The Age of Sustainable Development" gives students an understanding of the key challenges and pathways to sustainable development - that is, economic development that is also socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable.
Divided societies
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The Age of Sustainable Development
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Human Rights and Gender Equality
Professor Sachs delves into the ethics of wealth, poverty and inequality as well as the forces that widen inequalities.
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Jeffrey Sachs
Director, Earth Institute; Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development; Professor of Health Policy and Management
Social inclusion aims
for broad prosperity.
For fighting discrimination, for equal protection under
the laws, for enabling everybody to meet basic
needs. And for social mobility to ensure
that a child born in any part of the country in any part of the income
distribution to any class or ethnicity or race has a chance.
And through hard work, education, always a bit of luck mixed in, to achieve
a good standard of living, and economic success in society.
Of course, none of our societies achieves uniform equality.
And nobody would want that.
People differ by luck, tastes, work effort, and, naturally,
this would show up in variations in economic outcomes and wealth.
People expect such differences to an extent, but societies, of course,
can have differences far beyond anything that would
emerge from normal differences between individuals
and luck and circumstance and, for whatever reason, when
inequalities are very, very large ethics and human
rights would tell us that governments have some responsibility
to look after those left behind. And many would think that helping to
narrow the big gaps is part of our moral or ethical responsibility.
We've already looked at the actual situation
and how varied it is around the world.
We've looked at this map of the Gini Coefficient.
Remembering that the Gini Coefficient is a measure of income
inequality that varies between zero
and one. Zero would be a society where everyone has
exactly the same income. One would be a society where everybody but
one has zero income and one person has all the income that is complete inequality and
the Gini varies between those ranges, of course.
And what we saw is really some notable and important systematic
differences across regions of the world in the extent of inequality, and
therefore in the extent of social inclusion or exclusion.
On the whole,
the Americas, as I noted earlier, with the notable exception of Canada,
the Americas is a relatively unequal part of the world.
Western Europe is a relatively equal part of the world.
Northern Europe, especially the Scandinavian countries, Norway,
Sweden, Finland, Denmark or the Nordic countries,
I should say. Those countries Iceland included are
among the most equal places in the world and the Scandinavian
countries, specifically of Norway, Sweden and Denmark are
right at the top of the list of indicators of social
inclusion and at the bottom of the list with the lowest value of
the Gini Coefficient. When we look at this map, we should
think history, because standing behind this
is a long history, a legacy, that has led to certain kind
of inequality that I want to focus on for a few minutes.
This is inequality across groups rather than inequality
of individuals alone or inequality of households alone.
The inequality that we see varying across the world in this
map of the Gini Coefficient reflects the fact that whole groups within
society, defined according to race or, in some places,
according to ethnicity or linguistic group, or
tribe have very different life chances from
other groups in the same society. And so, the map,
while also reflecting normal variation across
individual households, also reflects
the interaction of different groups within society.
Take the case of the Western hemisphere with, again, Canada being
a notable exception, for a reason that will become clear in just a moment.
The Americas were, from the time of the first arrival of human
beings to the Americas, probably around 13,000 years before the
present, or thereabouts. To the year, and
we can date it to October 12, 1492,
the arrival of Columbus in the island of Hispaniola.
The Americans by and large had almost no contact
with the old world population. Maybe there was a tiny
bit of contact in very short period. When Icelanders
arrived in the coast of
Canada and the northeast of the United States for a brief sojourn
but without long term settlement. The only
long term settlement from that long period of
13,000 years before the present to the arrival of Columbus in October 1492
was by Americans, whom we now call Native Americans,
that arrived fairly early on in migration from Asia
after the last Glacial Period. And then settled throughout
the Americas and the Caribbean in and, and
established civilizations that developed completely independently
of what was taking place in Asia, in Europe, and in Africa,
until that connection was made once again with the arrival of the Europeans.
The Europeans arrived with two huge advantages.
One is they had more powerful weapons.
The second is they had pathogens that to had
developed the Old World to which the conquerors
came already immune or protected. And those
pathogens spread throughout the unprotected Native American
populations leading to massive, massive set
of epidemics and a massive dying off of Native American populations.
Well, you know the history, the Americas became a
kind of conquest society where European conquerors, and especially the
Spanish Conquistadoras came and conquered a large part of the
Americas, and generally ruled, and often ruled violently, over the
indigenous populations.
They added one more crucial element to the history of the
Americas starting in the sixteenth century, and that was to bring in
African slave labor, especially to the tropical and subtropical regions
of the Americas, such as the Caribbean, the American South, northeast of Brazil.
Not to Canada.
That's one of the reasons why Canada is different.
It never had a large slave population brought into Canada.
And what emerged, of course, was a very complicated society of
groups. A small European, dominant group,
which ruled by force and power and the backing
of empire, empires in Europe.
A an indigenous population that was often
broken by disease, by poverty, by forced labor.
Essentially a kind of slavery or serfdom that was imposed in many
places. And by the horrific
institution of slavery itself based on the importation
of African slaves into the Americas. And over
time that three categories became more
complicated of course, through a mixing of the three populations.
So
mulatto, or so called mixed populations of African slaves, European conquerors,
indigenous populations, and so forth also developed across many societies.
From the sixteenth century onward, those groups had completely different
situations in their society, politically, socially and economically.
And vast inequalities of wealth developed often
with this small European population own, owning
all of the, the good land in
the country with the native inhabitants pushed, pushed,
pushed into smaller and smaller land areas deprived of traditional land holdings.
All of this is to say that the history
of the Americas was a violent and conflictual one
that created an extensive inequality, rather shocking by the
standards of many, many other parts of the world.
And that legacy of inequality continued
past the sixteenth century, seventeenth century, eighteenth century,
until the present day. Slavery was eliminated,
thank goodness, in the nineteenth century,
usually by law in the United States, by,
only by war, a violent war fought to end slavery.
A very rare exception, because usually slavery was ended peacefully, but
not in the United States, where the, the hold of White
Southern land owners was so powerful that they resisted with a
full force and a very violent war to try to protect slavery.
And slavery was only ended in 1865, one of the last places in the world.
[SOUND] And only
two decades later, later in Brazil, so this
is a phenomenon that comes into the twentieth century.
And, of course, the descendants of slaves [SOUND] arrive to the twentieth century.
And until the end of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first century,
often with massive liabilities of poverty and difficulties of poor health,
lack of rights facing massive social discrimination.
I emphasize all of this because you look at the dark
red of the Americas in the Gini map, and you have to
remember the history behind this, of a whole region of the world essentially
settled by conquest, and then a long legacy that results
from that.
So, when we think about the forces of
inequality today, we need to keep a broad perspective.
This is the holistic approach that I like to emphasize.
Inter-generational dynamics plays a huge role.
Even when slavery ends, the legacy of slavery continues.
Even when the massive brutality
against Native Americans in the United States, essentially a genocide, or
the brutality against the so-called First Nations in Canada
ends by law, the legacy of poverty and poor health in
discrimination, in property holdings and so forth continues thereafter.
Social discrimination continues.
Racial discrimination. Ethic discrimination.
Of course, the gender discrimination which I will turn to shortly.
Regional differences persist. Sometimes for only
geographical physical reasons climate distance, transport,
landlockedness, sometimes for the historical reasons of how
various regions fell under imperial domination, for example.
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.
Nobody has a precise count of indigenous populations,
but I think it's probably right to say
that it's around 400 million people,
adding up indigenous populations around the world.
At least, that's an estimate that is often given and
that means that it's nearly 6% of the world's population.
And since many of those 400 million live in extreme poverty
and abject social exclusion, it's not a small part of the overall
numbers living in extreme poverty.
You're looking here at a graph of the poverty rates in some relatively
poor countries in the Americas, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru.
What you can see is that, in each case, the poverty rates among the
indigenous populations, are higher than the poverty rates among
the non-indigenous. And if one were to show the
African-American population's poverty
rates as well, those would be much, much higher too.
And, so, this is an example of how the indigenous populations in
the Americas face continuing challenges which are long, long legacies
of political military and
cultural discrimination. And many, many acts of
violence. This map of ethno-linguistic groups
highlights another point for us. Which is
that around the world, there are significant differences in the
extent of ethnic diversity.
Ethnic diversity sometimes measured along linguistic lines.
And a map like this gives
an indication of what's called ethno-linguistic fractionalization.
It asks how likely is it that two people selected at random
within a population within a country belong to the same ethnic group or
the same tribe as it might be called in some contexts.
You can see that Africa, for example
is just a maze of ethno-linguistic fractionalization.
And the differences of tribes in Africa, and the fact that when one tribe comes to
power, it may discriminate heatedly against others is
part of the political and social reality that has
made social inclusion so difficult.
You see in the Amazon region the
high degree of ethno-linguistic fractionalization as well.
All of this is to emphasize that when
we consider the challenges of social inequality and
the application of human rights to those challenges,
we will have to address this at several
different ways, in several different dimensions.
One is a class dimension.
What to do to help poor people and especially poor children
in poor households to achieve social mobility and the escape from poverty.
Another dimension, which I'm going to
discuss at greater length, is gender differences.
The systematic discrimination against women and against girls in
virtually all parts of the world, but here I've emphasized
the inequalities across groups and how power structures, colonial history,
discrimination systematically against indigenous populations has played a role.
We need to be aware of that
group-level discrimination as well if we're going to be accurate
and effective in overcoming social exclusion and achieving that
major killer of inclusive growth that is at the core of sustainable development.
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