GOI BLOCK 2
Credits naar Lieve en een beetje naar
Merlijn ♡
,Week 1 – Overview
◦ Lecture 9: Methodological issues II Measures and Maps of inequality
◦ Milanovic (2013) Global Income Inequality in Numbers: History and Now
◦ Hickel (2017) The Divide: A brief guide to global inequality and its solutions
◦ Van Houtum & Lacy (2020): The migration trap. On the invasion arrows in the cartography of migrat
◦ Lecture 10: Housing and inequalities
◦ Jacobs (2019) Neoliberal housing policy: An international perspective
◦ Van Gent & Hockstenbach (2020) The neoliberal politics and socio-spatial implications of Dutch po
crisis social housing policies
,Milanovic (2013) Global income inequality
in numbers: history and now
◦ Presents an overview of calculations of global inequality, recently and over the long term, and
outlines the main controversies and political and philosophical implications of the findings.
◦ Three concepts of inequality:
◦ Focused on inequality between nations of the world. It is an inequality statistic calculated across GDPs or
mean incomes obtained from household surveys of all countries in the world, without population weightin
◦ Population sizes are taken into account.
◦ Global inequality. This one is individual-based: each person, regardless of his or her country, enters in the
calculation with their actual income. The chief difficulty comes from the fact that to calculate concept 3
inequality we need access to household surveys with data on individual incomes or consumption. There a
still quite a few countries where these are not conducted regularly or properly.
◦ Those who desire to emphasize the unevenness of globalization tend to focus on growing inter-
country gaps without taking into account sizes of population, and prefer inequality 1. Those who
wish to focus on the positive aspects of globalization tend to favor concept 2, and to point to the
indubitable successes of China and India.
◦ To calculate ‘true’ global inequality, we have to adjust people’s incomes with the price levels the
face; of course, these differ between countries. The currency we use is the international (or
purchasing power parity (PPP)) dollar with which, in principle, one can buy the same amount of
goods and services in any country.
, Hickel (2017) The divide a brief guide to
global inequality and its solutions
◦ The end of poverty… has been postponed‘Good-news narrative’ about poverty: a comforting story, a
welcome contrast to the depressing tales that often fill the daily news cycle. It is also a potent political
tool, it helps the belief that the global economic system is on the right track and that poverty will end.
justifies the present economic order and maintains people’s consent for it. It is thus hard to admit that
poverty actually dramatically increased in the past thirty-five years, or that would call the whole game i
question - the single moral justification for the status quo would collapse. But in order to maintain the
good-news narrative, they have to limit themselves to a remarkably narrow slice of human history. The
Millennium Development Goals, for example, have trained us to forget everything that happens before
1990. That is a convenient date, because the poverty headcount increased steadily during the decade
before that. The 1980s were a decade of severe suffering in the global South, no matter how much you
doctor the numbers.
◦ Even James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank quoted on admitted that the 1960s and 197
were better days for developing countries - before the World Bank and the IMF intervened. So what
worked so well? And why have we been told to forget about it? These questions should be answered
according to Hickel. He argues that in order to get the full story of global poverty and inequality we ne
to go back further than even the 1960s. Recall that Wolfensohn himself pointed out that poverty had
been increasing steadily over the past 200 years, during the rise of industrialisation and the
consolidation of Western economic power. Why? What was going on? And why is is this not part of the
story we have been told?
Credits naar Lieve en een beetje naar
Merlijn ♡
,Week 1 – Overview
◦ Lecture 9: Methodological issues II Measures and Maps of inequality
◦ Milanovic (2013) Global Income Inequality in Numbers: History and Now
◦ Hickel (2017) The Divide: A brief guide to global inequality and its solutions
◦ Van Houtum & Lacy (2020): The migration trap. On the invasion arrows in the cartography of migrat
◦ Lecture 10: Housing and inequalities
◦ Jacobs (2019) Neoliberal housing policy: An international perspective
◦ Van Gent & Hockstenbach (2020) The neoliberal politics and socio-spatial implications of Dutch po
crisis social housing policies
,Milanovic (2013) Global income inequality
in numbers: history and now
◦ Presents an overview of calculations of global inequality, recently and over the long term, and
outlines the main controversies and political and philosophical implications of the findings.
◦ Three concepts of inequality:
◦ Focused on inequality between nations of the world. It is an inequality statistic calculated across GDPs or
mean incomes obtained from household surveys of all countries in the world, without population weightin
◦ Population sizes are taken into account.
◦ Global inequality. This one is individual-based: each person, regardless of his or her country, enters in the
calculation with their actual income. The chief difficulty comes from the fact that to calculate concept 3
inequality we need access to household surveys with data on individual incomes or consumption. There a
still quite a few countries where these are not conducted regularly or properly.
◦ Those who desire to emphasize the unevenness of globalization tend to focus on growing inter-
country gaps without taking into account sizes of population, and prefer inequality 1. Those who
wish to focus on the positive aspects of globalization tend to favor concept 2, and to point to the
indubitable successes of China and India.
◦ To calculate ‘true’ global inequality, we have to adjust people’s incomes with the price levels the
face; of course, these differ between countries. The currency we use is the international (or
purchasing power parity (PPP)) dollar with which, in principle, one can buy the same amount of
goods and services in any country.
, Hickel (2017) The divide a brief guide to
global inequality and its solutions
◦ The end of poverty… has been postponed‘Good-news narrative’ about poverty: a comforting story, a
welcome contrast to the depressing tales that often fill the daily news cycle. It is also a potent political
tool, it helps the belief that the global economic system is on the right track and that poverty will end.
justifies the present economic order and maintains people’s consent for it. It is thus hard to admit that
poverty actually dramatically increased in the past thirty-five years, or that would call the whole game i
question - the single moral justification for the status quo would collapse. But in order to maintain the
good-news narrative, they have to limit themselves to a remarkably narrow slice of human history. The
Millennium Development Goals, for example, have trained us to forget everything that happens before
1990. That is a convenient date, because the poverty headcount increased steadily during the decade
before that. The 1980s were a decade of severe suffering in the global South, no matter how much you
doctor the numbers.
◦ Even James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank quoted on admitted that the 1960s and 197
were better days for developing countries - before the World Bank and the IMF intervened. So what
worked so well? And why have we been told to forget about it? These questions should be answered
according to Hickel. He argues that in order to get the full story of global poverty and inequality we ne
to go back further than even the 1960s. Recall that Wolfensohn himself pointed out that poverty had
been increasing steadily over the past 200 years, during the rise of industrialisation and the
consolidation of Western economic power. Why? What was going on? And why is is this not part of the
story we have been told?
