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Dingizulu Mahlathini
JOSEPH Eugene Stiglitz’s book, The Price of Inequality, first published in 2012 is a must-read for any progressive Zimbabwean as it demystifies America as a land of opportunity. The book retraces how America’s economy has since 2000 widened the gap between the rich and poor.
It makes it clear without fear or favour how America’s policies have contributed to the current shutdown of the superpower’s economy.
Stiglitz was Chief Economist at the World Bank until January 2000 and is currently the University Professor of the Columbia Business School.
This comes into direct contrast to Zimbabwe’s policies, which since 2000, have been geared towards integrating the poor into the mainstream of the economy thereby creating a wider base for wealth creation, in the process avoiding a complete shutdown of the economy which the west, America included, had anticipated for us by the year 2008.
How a country without sanctions like America will come to a shutdown, yet one that it has slapped with illegal sanctions is still going strong is amazing in as much as it breaks new ground for research by world economists.
Zimbabwe’s policies are epitomised by the land reform programme of 2000 and the on-going indigenisation and economic empowerment programme.
Interestingly, Zimbabwe’s policies of uplifting the living standards of the generality of its people coincided with America’s tide of the growing inequality gap which started in 2000, the same year the land reform roared into life in earnest. Whereas on the eve of the land reform, Zimbabwe boasted of at least 4 500 white farmers, the land reform programme saw at least 300 000 landless people acquire land.
To this effect the American Stiglitz postulates that, “… for the past thirty years, we have become increasingly growing fastest, but the bottom has actually been declining … (But then, as we’ve seen, beginning around 2000, inequality grew at an even more rapid pace.)”
Stiglitz’s argument presents the American economy as a fulfilment of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides who said, “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
More astonishingly for Zimbabweans many of whom view America as the land of opportunity, Stiglitz reveals that, “. . . large numbers of Americans go to bed at least once a month hungry, not because they are on diet but because they can’t afford food.”
More so America’s Economic Mobility Project and research from the Economic Policy Institute makes stunning revelations to the effect that:
● Poor kids who succeed academically are less likely to graduate from college than richer kids who do worse in school.
● Even if they graduate from college, the children of the poor are still worse off than low achieving children of the rich.
Stiglitz goes to sum up what he terms as stark and uncomfortable facts about the US economy as follows:
● Recent US income growth primarily occurs at the top one percent of the income distribution
● As a result there is growing inequality.
● And those at the bottom and in the middle are actually worse off today than they were at the beginning of the century.
● Inequalities in wealth are even greater than inequalities in income.
● Inequalities are apparent not just in income but in a variety of other variables that reflect standards of living such as insecurity and health.
● Life is particularly harsh at the bottom — and the recession made it much worse.
● There has been a hollowing out of the middle class.
● There is little income mobility — the notion of America as a land of opportunity is a myth.
● And America has more inequality than any other advanced industrialised country; it does less to correct these inequities, and inequality is growing more than in many other countries.
Surely, if America’s policies have been this flawed, how then can the same country be taken seriously in so far as directing policies to other nations is concerned. Why the MDC-T thought it was going to get into power by creating jobs, which its masters were failing to, is another serious revelation on why the people should stick to Zanu-PF the people’s revolutionary party.
Indeed this is a must read book for people who constitute Zimbabwe’s future as in a way it soothes one with sobriety in as much as it invokes the spirit of nationalism.
● Dingizulu Mahlathini Moyo is a Bulawayo-based political and social commentator.
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