You can’t speak about inequality without acknowledging that it occurs when power and money are concentrated into the hands of a few. Last year the 24 wealthiest individuals in the world owned as much as the bottom 50%, or 3.8 billion people. In 2016 Walmart accounted for more economic activity than the country of Spain. That same year Toyota accounted for more economic activity than India. In the US the top 1% have as much wealth as the bottom 80%.
It was reported in March of 2020 that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos was the richest person in the world with a net worth of over $140 billion. What is so disturbing is that in the last three months, during the Black Lives Matter protests, crushing pandemic and resulting economic challenges, his holdings have increased by over $20 billion. All while those at the lower end of our economy take the brunt of our society’s misfortunes.
As states prepare to make devastating cuts to services such as education and healthcare to balance their budgets, the Federal Government continues to buy its own debt, bolster markets and provide loans/grants for corporations mere weeks after the longest economic expansion in our country’s history. Eleanor Russell and Martin Parker recently published an interesting article that offered historical insight on wealth transfers that occur during devastating pandemics.
Their article focused on the 14th century Plague or “Black Death,” which killed between a third to a half of the population throughout Europe and the Middle East. One firsthand account out of Scotland reported, “This sickness befell people everywhere, but especially the middling and lower classes, rarely the great. It generated such horror that children did not dare to visit their dying parents, nor parents their children, but fled for fear of contagion as if from leprosy or a serpent.”
The built environment cannot help but display the inequality that is tearing apart the fabric of our civil society. While the underlying conditions that give rise to inequality worsen, I fear situations like the one pictured here will only continue to increase.