An editorial / review in a recent Economist magazine ("Economics Focus: The new (improved) Gilded Age") discusses something that I've been pondering for many years, but haven't been very good at articulating. Despite the sharp – even alarming – rates of increase in "income inequality" throughout the world in recent decades, something else is going on that isn't being captured in standard economic statistics: this is the somewhat weird but, I believe, oddly compelling observation that although incomes are diverging, lifestyles are converging.
I don't know if this is really true, but the anecdotal evidence offered in the article is interesting, such as the observation that a $300 refrigerator and a $10,000 one aren't that different in terms of the what they can do for you. Likewise, the cheapo Hyundai sedan vs the Jaguar. They both are typically driven by owners on the same crowded highways, despite a 1000 percent difference in price.
This ties in with an idea I like to think of as rooted in marxist analysis (though I'm not confident that that's its provenance): as capitalism continues to evolve, it drives constantly toward manufacturing new "necessities" which, as a matter of course, are not true human necessities but strictly market-created artificial ones. And the rich, with all that extra income that the income gap is giving them, go chasing after these artificial necessities, while the lot of the poor continues to improve, albeit slowly, with respect to the profoundly less artificial necessities which they seek to satisfy.
So incomes are out of wack, and constantly more so. And consumption, as measured by dollars outlaid, is also diverging. But if you measure consumption by a more intangible concept such as "range of experience," you will find the experience of rich and poor converging in strange ways. Fishermen in India, bankers in southwest Connecticut, and grandmonthers and schoolchildren in Korea all use cell phones in markedly similar ways to improve the quality of their very different lives, at almost universal levels of adoption. And, in other extremes, obesity (a disease of affluence) strikes the poor more than the rich.
OK. I don't know where I'm going with this. I'm not trying to say it excuses governments' complicity in the capitalist plunder of the world's people and resources. Capitalists, being capitalists, require ethical supervision, I suspect. But I do think the apocalypto-alarmist rhetoric from the anti-globalization camps and the anarcho-left may be rooted in an inaccurate analysis of the current state of the world's economy, vis-a-vis real human needs (i.e. as opposed to manufactured needs).