Awareness to the Inequality at our Society (Essay Sample)

Global Inequality
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Global Inequality
Globalization can be described as the increasing inter-connections across nations on both economic and cultural levels. It has been largely associated with the deindustrialization of the American State. As large corporations in the United States spread their tentacles, they spread different sections of their business across various areas of the world. Consequently, a single company’s inputs such as labor and raw materials may come from separate nations. Globalization was caused by a need to cheapen production costs which was possible outside the United States, but it caused major economic losses for the American workforce, while exploiting that of the developing nations (Perucci and Wysong, 2003).
Starting out in 1n the 1970s, technological advances made it possible and affordable for industries in the United States to relocate most of their factories to other regions of the world where worker protections and remunerations were very low as labor unions were shunned by the government, and environmental laws were nonexistent or never enforced. These augmenting factors cheapened production costs in developing countries effectively raising profits for corporates while backstabbing U.S. workers’ wages as they now had to compete with those in cheaper economies. In the course of the proceeding 25 years, industrial outsourcing coupled with developments in automation, led to a drastic dip in manufacturing jobs across the United States. This led a shift to service jobs especially in the fast food industry where workers did not have organized labor unions (Perucci and Wysong, 2003).
A common underlying experience for the displaced workers was that they had been ‘discarded’ from the middle class. These workers previously regarded themselves as the middle class due to their white-collar wage and lifestyle which included automobiles, home ownership and vacations. They got good remuneration, pension programs, and health care benefits. They in every sense had everything associated with membership in the middle class. Their gains from the American Dream faced threat as their stable jobs and secure income vanished. Within a short period, these workers and their families fell into the new working class that encompassed 80 percent of Americans living without stable income (Perucci and Wysong, 2003).
From the 1970s onwards, the American class structure got reshaped from the previous layered middle class society. The privileged class led an attack on higher-wage unionized workers, textile mills and much of the jobs in the manufacturing industry. Soon the reshaping strategy included not only relocations and closings, but also downsizing and restructuring, which effectively cut down the number of middle class jobs. Here globalization increased inequality within the U.S. but reduced inequality with other countries to some extent (Perucci and Wysong, 2003).
Theorists and political leaders argue that the reshaping and economic transformation was a result of the normal workings of the new bolstered global economy. President Ronald Reagan applauded the transformation as a historic opportunity for economic revitalization. He argued that the economic progression from agricultural to manufacturing, and to services was a natural change, terming the shift as one of the greatest changes to hit the developed world since the Industrial revolution (Perucci and Wysong, 2003).
However, opponents of this view argued that the reshaping was not a product of natural laws or the ‘hidden hand’ of global markets but that of calculated maneuvers at profit making and power consolidation by corporates. The decision to close shop and migrate abroad in search of cheap labor and weak regulations was a profit seeking venture, and not a mere response to global competition much as the said ‘global competition’ resulted from relocated U.S. companies. These companies put pressure on workers back home to work more efficiently with reverse growth in benefits (Perucci and Wysong, 2003).
Looking at wealthy countries like the United States, it is easy to paint the contrast of global inequality. Although these nations occupy a mere one-sixth of world population, these countries hold up to 80% of the world’s gross wealth accumulated through early advances in industry, extraction of colonial resources, and domination of means of production. They are the frontrunners in virtually every sector including industry, information technology, and finance and their influence is exercised all over the earth. A comparison of Gini coefficients, a measure of poverty shows a lower value for these nations and a high value for poor countries (Reading and Questions: University of Minnesota, Global Stratification, Week 4).
As observed in the 2008 financial crisis, when the economies of a few wealthy countries slow down, the entire world rocks. As much as these countries also have a level of internal stratification, in summation, these group of nations live a better life than the middle-income and poor nations. Inhabitants of wealthy nations are more educated and have a longer life expectancy. These wealthy nations consume more than their fair share of the earth’s natural resources and go on to pollute the earth at a greater degree than the rest of the countries with a catastrophic cost in the name of global warming, drought and extreme weather conditions (Reading and Questions: University of Minnesota, Global Stratification, Week 4).
Dependency theorists attribute global inequality to colonization which ensured that European nations exploited poor nations’ resources and labor effectively ensuring that these countries could not build capacity to industrialize. Modernization theorists argue that wealthy nations managed to develop necessary values and practices to push industrialization while poor nations retained a stagnant poise that left them behind (Reading and Questions: University of Minnesota, Global Stratification, Week 4).
At a global scale, inequality is being faced in different ways. One billion hungry people now inhabit the earth for the first time in our history. Current data from the United Nations suggests that a large swathe of earth’s inhabitants are now hungry compared to a decade ago (Scanlan et al, 2010). This appears in a sociological element called food poverty. Sociologists have discovered that social inequalities, economic and political factors, and distribution systems create barriers to food access in various parts of the world while they favor others. In such a conception, hunger is part of the wider concept of food security which has been described by the World Bank as the inability to get access to the food necessary for sustenance of a healthy and active life (Scanlan et al, 2010).
Food agencies working to reduce food poverty have focused on scarcity a cause. They view hunger from a marketing, production, and logistics angle, and as a problem that can be solved by market based policies on the global food system. However, these market based policies tend to further cut off access to food as they increase the prices making food less affordable for those in need. Food surplus actually exists, the only problem is securing access through an equitable basis. Famines have been observed in countries like India during periods when wheat is rotting in excess. Some regions of the world are suffering from famine while global markets are overflowing with the global surplus being enough to address any emergency shortfalls (Scanlan et al, 2010).
Frances, Collins and Rosset argue that globalization, free trade, and food aid act as barriers to food access when inequalities are deeply ingrained. It is these inequalities that curtail food supply and perpetuate food poverty. World hunger statistics are staggering and they do reveal the stark global inequalities. About 96% of hungry people are inhabitants of developing countries. U