User:UnoDosTrey/sandbox

Economic inequality project proposal

Listed below is the current outline of the major sections of the “Economic inequality” article. Almost the full entirety of my work will be focused on the “Causes” section, but after each heading I have listed potential areas of improvement and a list of sources from which my contributions will be derived.

1. LEAD — Much of the second half of the lead belongs in the Measurements section and only serves to complicate the introduction of the concept of economic inequality. I will potentially seek to add more to the general description with information sourced from a combination of the sources found in other sections of my revisions as well as those listed immediately below.
   • Pogge, Thomas W. (2003). Global Justice. Science and Society 67 (2):261-264.
   • Pogge, Thomas W.. “Eradicating systemic poverty: brief for a Global Resources Dividend.” Sur. Revista Internacional De Direitos Humanos 4 (2007): 142-166.
   • Anand, Sudhir, Segal, Paul and Stiglitz, Joseph, (2010), Debates on the Measurement of Global Poverty, Oxford University Press.
2. MEASUREMENTS — This section is mostly good material, only requiring perhaps a few grammatical tweaks to improve narrative cohesion.
3. CAUSES — This section is the crux of the work that I will be doing on this article. Given that gender has its own section under Causes, it is necessary to add a section detailing the global trends of economic inequality within the context of race. I will create a new subsection that will explore how racial groups in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and their minority counterparts in the developed Western world have been historically and systematically disadvantaged. I will use numbers and statistics from modern research to reflect this and make mention of income and wealth gaps between races in a global context and then describe how that affects economic inequality as a whole worldwide.
   • Becker, B. “Mind the Income Gaps? Experimental Evidence of Information’s Lasting Effect on Redistributive Preferences.” (2020) Social Justice Research, 33 (2), pp. 137-194.
   • Finseraas, H. “Poverty, ethnic minorities among the poor, and preferences for redistribution in European regions.” (2012) Journal of European Social Policy, 22 (2), pp. 164-180
   • Bapuji, Hari, and Snehanjali Chrispal. “Understanding Economic Inequality Through the Lens of Caste.” Journal of business ethics 162, no. 3 (March 2020): 533–551.
   • Bell, Duncan. Empire, Race and Global Justice / Edited by Duncan Bell, University of Cambridge. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
   • Brady, David, and Linda Burton. The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty / Edited by David Brady and Linda M. Burton. First edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
   • Mitchell, William P. Voices from the Global Margin : Confronting Poverty and Inventing New Lives in the Andes / by William P. Mitchell. First edition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.
   • Finkel, Alvin. Compassion : a Global History of Social Policy / Alvin Finkel. London: Red Globe Press, 2020.
4. MITIGATING FACTORS — I believe this section potentially needs to be integrated into the Policy Responses section, as it seems odd to be given a section of its own when it simply describes existing policy that has demonstrated some level of functionality. This would involve removing the “Mitigating Factors” headline and comfortably embedding its information in “Policy Responses”.
5. EFFECTS — I would potentially like to add some sections concerning the ideas of inherited and cyclical economic disadvantage into this section, but ultimately it will be absolutely secondary to my work on the causes section. Still, I would possibly make mention of the formation of poverty traps and spiraling inequality, along with the social tensions that come alongside that.
   • Buitelaar, Edwin, Anet B. R. Weterings, and Roderik Ponds. Cities, Economic Inequality and Justice : Reflections and Alternative Perspectives / Edwin Buitelaar, Anet Weterings and Roderik Ponds. Abingdon, Oxon ;: Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.
   • Bandow, Doug., and Ian. Vásquez. Perpetuating Poverty : the World Bank, the IMF, and the Developing World / Edited by Doug Bandow and Ian Vásquez. Washington, D.C: Cato Institute, 1994.
   • Jeffrey D. Sachs, John W. McArthur, Guido Schmidt-Traub, Margaret Kruk, Chandrika Bahadur, Michael Faye, and Gordon McCord. “Ending Africa’s Poverty Trap.” Brookings papers on economic activity 2004, no. 1 (January 1, 2004): 117–216.
   • Marx, Benjamin, Thomas Stoker, and Tavneet Suri. “The Economics of Slums in the Developing World.” The Journal of economic perspectives 27, no. 4 (2013): 187–210.
6. PERSPECTIVES — I do not plan on changing much in this section.
7. POLICY RESPONSES — I may be adding information from the Mitigating Factors section into this heading as described above.

Race

There is also a globally recognized disparity in the wealth, income, and economic welfare of people of different races. In many nations, data exists to suggest that members of certain racial demographics experience lower wages, fewer opportunities for career and educational advancement, and intergenerational wealth gaps. Studies have uncovered the emergence of what is called "ethnic capital", by which people belonging to a race that has experienced discrimination are born into a disadvantaged family from the beginning and therefore have less resources and opportunities at their disposal. The universal lack of education, technical and cognitive skills, and inheritable wealth within a particular race is often passed down between generations, compounding in effect to make escaping these racialized cycles of poverty increasingly difficult. Additionally, ethnic groups that experience significant disparities are often also minorities, at least in representation though often in number as well, in the nations where they experience the harshest disadvantage. As a result, they are often segregated either by government policy or social stratification, leading to ethnic communities that experience widespread gaps in wealth and aid.

As a general rule, races which have been historically and systematically colonized (typically indigenous ethnicities) continue to experience lower levels of financial stability in the present day. The global South is considered to be particularly victimized by this phenomenon, though the exact socioeconomic manifestations change across different regions.

Western Nations

Even in economically developed societies with high levels of modernization such as may be found in Western Europe, North America, and Australia, minority ethnic groups and immigrant populations in particular experience financial discrimination. While the progression of civil rights movements and justice reform has improved access to education and other economic opportunities in politically advanced nations, racial income and wealth disparity still prove significant. In the United States for example, which serves as a good basis for understanding racial discrimination in the West due to the amount of research attention it receives, a survey of African-American populations show that they are more likely to drop out of high school and college, are typically employed for fewer hours at lower wages, how lower than average intergenerational wealth, and are more likely to use welfare as young adults than their white counterparts. Mexican-Americans, while suffering less debilitating socioeconomic factors than black Americans, experience deficiencies in the same areas when compared to whites and have not assimilated financially to the level of stability experienced by white Americans as a whole. These experiences are the effects of the measured disparity due to race in countries like the US, where studies show that in comparison to whites, blacks suffer from drastically lower levels of upward mobility, higher levels of downward mobility, and poverty that is more easily transmitted to offspring as a result of the disadvantage stemming from the era of slavery and post-slavery racism that has been passed through racial generations to the present. These are lasting financial inequalities that apply in varying magnitudes to most non-white populations in nations such as the US, the UK, France, Spain, Australia, etc.

Latin America

In the countries of the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, many ethnicities continue to deal with the effects fo European colonization, and in general nonwhites tend to be noticeably poorer than whites in this region. In many countries with significant populations of indigenous races and those of Afro-descent (such as Mexico, Colombia, Chile, etc.) income levels can be roughly half as high as those experiences by white demographics, and this inequity is accompanied by systematically unequal access to education, career opportunities, and poverty relief. This region of the world, apart from urbanizing areas like Brazil and Costa Rica, continues to be understudied and often the racial disparity is denied by Latin Americans who consider themselves to be living in post-racial and post-colonial societies far removed from intense social and economic stratification despite the evidence to the contrary.

Africa

African countries, too, continue to deal with the effects of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which set back economic development as a whole for blacks of African citizenship more than any other region. The degree to which colonizers stratified their holdings on the continent on the basis of race has had a direct correlation in the magnitude of disparity experienced by nonwhites in the nations that eventually rose from their colonial status. Former French colonies, for example, see much higher rates of income inequality between whites and nonwhites as a result of the rigid hierarchy imposed by the French who lived in Africa at the time. Another prime example is found in South Africa, which, still reeling from the socioeconomic impacts of Apartheid, experiences some of the highest racial income and wealth inequality in all of Africa. In these and other countries like Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone, movements of civil reform have initially led to improved access to financial advancement opportunities, but data actually shows that for nonwhites this progress is either stalling or erasing itself in the newest generation of blacks that seek education and improved transgenerational wealth. The economic status of one's parents continues to define and predict the financial futures of African and minority ethnic groups.

Asia

Asian regions and countries such as China, the Middle East, and Central Asia have been vastly understudied in terms of racial disparity, but even here the effects of Western colonization provide similar results to those found in other parts of the globe. Additionally, cultural and historical practices such as the caste system in India leave their marks as well. While the disparity is greatly improving in the case of India, there still exists social stratification between peoples of lighter and darker skin tones that cumulatively result in income and wealth inequality, manifesting in many of the same poverty traps seen elsewhere.