Thinking about Social Inequality and Waves of Unrest
This morning I published a short piece on the structure and politics of labor in Iran at the USIP blog. There is a small section in the article about absolute vs relative poverty in Iran vis-a-vis Egypt. I want to expand on that here, because while absolute poverty is something that economists take seriously, relative poverty, or, more aptly phrased, social inequality, is something that sociologists take seriously. And so should you.
As a region in the global South, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is not the poorest in terms of absolute poverty - the percentage of a population under an absolute line of consumption expenditures. East Asia (EA) and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) contain larger segments of their population under the World Bank’s oft-used “$2 a day” line. Of course the boundaries of the “Middle East” - a totally useless unit if you take geography seriously - can sometimes lump in poorer states and richer states that have very different political economies and relations to the outside world. But I’ll let that slide here.
According to the World Bank, for 2005,
- MENA states had 16.9% of their population living under $2 a day on average
- EA was at 38.9%
- SSA was at an alarming 72.9%
- India’s poverty level, 75.6%, is similar to Africa’s
- Latin America’s poverty level, 17.1%, is very close to the Middle East’s.
- Iran’s absolute poverty level at $2/day in 2005 stood at 8% (if you use higher poverty lines, you get higher poverty rates in Iran, or anywhere - but I am trying to compare countries and regions here and the World Bank only gives us this line to use).
Since I tend to look at development issues in world-historical terms, I would wager that regional variations in poverty within the global South cannot just be explained by individual states either caring or not caring about poverty, or by class relations and capitalist development within individual countries. Those two aspects matter, but what also matters is how regional political economies relate to and integrate with the world economy.
Latin America has a long history of state formation because of its colonial and post-independence history, longer than the rest of the post-colonial global South, and that might play a role in its ability to expend resources on the poorest over the 20th century. The Middle East, in many countries, does not have a long history of post-colonial state formation, but in the 20th century it did possess a history of high-capacity (powerful) states compared to other regions. And, as in Eastern Europe and Russia in the 20th century, another distinct “region” that I would include in or near the global South, strong state capacity can be used to rapidly lower poverty levels through egalitarian social policies. These sort of polices were implemented widely in the 1960s after formal independence in the MENA region, and that includes Iran once you take into account the Shah’s White Revolution (a milder form of egalitarianism, yes, but still a change in policy). The point is that each region did not proceed along the same path, nor were these paths irreversible. One cannot explain the high poverty rates in Africa, for example, simply because of state failure, but also because the area’s comparative economic advantages in the 1960s in the world economy disappeared when East Asia rapidly industrialized.
This is all a precursor to my actual point, which is: if MENA is relatively less poor than other regions, why is everyone reporting on high poverty levels as one of the cause of the grievances that is driving the ongoing wave of rebellion and unrest in MENA states? They are confusing absolute poverty, which is not the biggest problem in the MENA region, with relative poverty, or, as I prefer to call it, inequality.
Inequality is measured a lot of different ways, but the most common method is the Gini coefficient, which scales a country’s income inequality from 1 (totally equal) to 100 (totally unequal). Gini levels of 60 are very unequal in the real world, only a few countries like South Africa or Brazil have been up there. The United States is currently at a Gini level of 43, which is quite high for wealthy countries, and is a return to the high inequality of the US in the days of H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain.
Just as with absolute levels of poverty, world regions also exhibit clustering around particular levels of inequality that persist for long periods of history. And, again, I would argue that this is because of particular differences in the ways and times that different regions were integrated into the world economy, as well as the subsequent changes in this “region <—> world” relationship. So there is an under-theorized link between levels of inequality within countries, regional political economies and their average inequality, and global processes of economic expansion and geopolitical formation.
That’s just a caveat against the usual story where states and national economies are seen as totally enclosed social units and all their problems can be explained away by looking at government policies - sometimes called “methodological statism.”
Back to our story, though. Looking at regional levels of inequality, a different variation emerges. The Gini coefficients shown below is the index divided by 100, that’s why it has a decimal point. (Note, I don’t agree with the methodology of this table from The Economist because it uses PPP data, but it suffices for this post):
Here, LA and MENA are not the same at all. LA contains much more inequality than MENA, and looks most similar to Africa. So, there’s an interesting puzzle here:
- Latin America is a low poverty, high inequality region.
- South Asia is a high poverty, low inequality region.
- (Sub-Saharan) Africa is a high poverty, high inequality region.
- And the MENA “region” - again, I am not totally comfortable with this particular division of the world - is a low poverty, low inequality region.
The Gini index in Egypt in 2005 was 32. In Iran, it was 38. In the USA, 43. In Latin America, 53. Shouldn’t Egyptians just settle and be happy?
Well, this is where sociology becomes perhaps more useful than economics. There are many points of comparison from which people can perceive inequality. People almost always compare their own livelihoods, status, and income to their neighbors. They also compare themselves to their community (village, city). With a strong sense of nationalism, they compare themselves to everyone in their country. And, now that we have a fairly global media and cultural system, they compare themselves to lifestyles in wealthy Northern countries.
The largest Gini inequality of them all, by the way, cannot be found inside any country. The highest inequality in the world is the inequality between countries - i.e. the wealth gap between North and South. Using exchange-rate based income data, in 2007 the “global Gini” stood at 75.5!
So, inequality can be perceived as quite stark in a social sense, even when the data shows that it is relatively less than in other regions. If you’ve ever been to Egypt or Iran, you can tell class differences between individuals almost immediately, whether as marked in geography, in fashion, in cultural consumption, etc. No one goes around wearing a Gini on their shirt. They wear Gucci. Well, those that can afford it. Or those who can afford a Gucci knockoff, which in itself is a symptom of global inequalities of wealth and consumption.
Sociologists have long known that various forms of inequality, or call it relative poverty or relative deprivation, generate deep social grievances. But if grievances always led to rebellions, then why aren’t there more Tunisias and Egypts (and ____ … to be continued) every year? Why is 2011 becoming a world-historical turning point?
Well, this question is the subject of a large literature on the sociology of contentious politics, social movements, revolutions, etc. It’s complex. Grievances in individuals rarely developing into mobilized movements among groups. This is true even when, from the outside, or on TV, it looks like these movements are totally spontaneous. They are not mobs, even if that’s what one sees on You Tube. Mobilization needs some combination of independent resources, organizational prowess, networks of communication, common frames of grievances that resonate emotionally, and usually a few charismatic leaders.
But that also means that the current consensus, that all of this protest is coming because everyone in the Middle East is poor, is wrong. In fact, it might just be the opposite. All of this protest might be emerging partly because MENA is not that poor at all, absolutely. The absolutely poor are usually not the ones that revolt. It takes resources to revolt. Students and workers, those who feel excluded and unequal from others in their country, their surrounding countries, and the wealthy world - those are the social actors in the MENA streets.
In other words, relative poverty - inequality - becomes more important for politics as absolute poverty goes down. Well, if I say it that way it just sounds true. Why did it take all of this post to get here?
