The “Occupy” movement has now reached a new height. What was once a small protest on Wall Street against the “greed” of American capitalists, has now spread across many countries. In Chile, roughly 25,000 citizens went to the capital to protest the vast amount of wealth its billionaire president has. In Spain, protesters went against new economic policies implemented by the outgoing president
At the heart of all these is a protest against economic inequality. Protesters felt that the world’s wealth is distributed unequally since only one percent of the world’s population is experiencing financial abundance. Fundamentally, this begs the question of how divided really is the remaining 99 percent? Even with this renewed interest for welfare in mind, it is as if those protesters, mostly still coming from the top 13 percent of the world’s wealthier population, are ignorant of those facing real development issues.
A look at statistics about global underdevelopment would give us a picture of the more important problems the occupy movement truly needs to care about.
Within that 99 percent is an even greater picture of inequality. According to a study released by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University (UNU-WIDER), 13 percent of the world’s population owns 45 percent of the world’s income. The United States and other developed nations are included in the said statistics. On the other hand, 42 percent of the world’s population owns roughly about 9 percent of this income; the rest of the world’s wealth is divided among those in between. The United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDG) reports give us an even clearer picture of the problems the poorest of the world’s poor experience.
According to the MDG fact sheet released during the UN summit of 2010, roughly 1.4 billion people around the world are living below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day. An estimated 925 million people suffered chronic hunger and malnutrition in the year 2010. According to the fact sheet, although progress has been made in alleviating such a problem, it has been made at a relatively slow pace.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, one in seven children dies before the age of five because their families cannot provide the necessary nutrition to sustain their health. In education, around 31 million school-aged children in Sub-Saharan Africa are out of school.
As of 2010, 880 million people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water. Consequently, the number of people who lack access to basic sanitation services is numbered at 2.6 billion.
In contrast, the United States , the country where the protests originated from, has a GDP per capita of roughly $42, 866 and is considered the largest economy in the world. If we use the international poverty line as a measure, the US has virtually eliminated extreme poverty in their country. This is true for many other developed countries, some of which have had their own version of the occupy movement. According to World Bank economist Brank Milanovic (2002), “an American having the average income of the bottom US decile is better-off than 2/3 of world population.”
“The top 10 percent of the US population has an aggregate income equal to income of the poorest 43 percent of people in the world, or differently put, total income of the richest 25 million Americans is equal to total income of almost two billion people” he furthers.
While protesters on Wall Street are fighting for better social services, welfare programs and mortgage deals, people in Sub-Saharan Africa struggle everyday just to survive. Whatever grievances they may have against their governments, the problems that occupy protesters face pale much in comparison to those from the developing world.
Occupy protesters want change and they seemingly care about development, but only that which concerns them. This flawed sense of idealism and altruism would merely lead to misguided policy recommendations and a failed attempt at genuine change or reform. The occupy movement, is a logical yet misguided attempt at fostering “development”.
If this is the kind of mentality that prevails among the world’s richer nations, then such mentality may be the reason that protests of the same nature over the past 10 years have failed to initiate any real reform.
If we insist on focusing on ourselves, the privileged few, then we may never really get to see the day that the world moves out of poverty. While the world’s poor are determined to get out of their current conditions, there are many institutions and problems that hinder them from doing so.
It takes a greater and more concentrated effort from citizens and government institutions to foster a true sense of development. Until we look beyond ourselves, we will never create true progress as a global community.
