Indeed, in a global context in which national borders and citizenship pose few barriers to the mobility of capital, the reality of the world’s richest individuals getting even richer is also a story of the world’s richest nations continuing to reap a disproportionate amount of the globe’s profits. Yet while inequality has become a topic of increased popularity and politicization in recent years, most of the attention has focused on how 1 percent, or even 0.1 percent, of individuals own an increasingly large share of the world’s wealth, rather than on inequalities between nations.
Among them are the extent to which extreme inequalities and financial crises, like the disastrous one that happened in 2008, are aberrations of, or inherent to, capitalist development. In this context, scholars, politicians, and ordinary people alike have found themselves asking age-old questions about inequality, and more deeply about the nature of capitalism. What is more, rather than globalization bringing about economic stability, development, and a sense of a global community, in recent years it seems it has brought about greater instability and the further congealing of racism and other social boundaries.
The current moment, in the global North and South, is also one where these new forms and sentiments of precariousness in economic life have come alongside a reconfiguration of the relationship between the state and the economy, unsustainable practices of extraction, and various kinds of displacements, from land dispossession to gentrification in urban centers to unprecedented migration within and between countries. In this period, massive protests have erupted in the global North and South against neoliberal reforms, the solidification of flexible labor regimes, and austerity policies. “The reality of the world’s richest individuals getting even richer is also a story of the world’s richest nations continuing to reap a disproportionate amount of the globe’s profits.” The concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands has been at the center of increased political contestation and media attention in recent years.
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