The poor don't gain when societies ignore the rich. The rich just amass more of the clout and power they need to keep getting richer off the poor—and everyone else.
Some conflicts we can see—and understand—rather easily. Their raw rhetoric will typically help us identify the opposing players and what they’re fighting over.
“We envisage a world in which every country enjoys sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth and decent work for all,” the assembled dignitaries declared. “A world in which consumption and production patterns and use of all natural resources—from air to land, from rivers, lakes, and aquifers to oceans and seas—are sustainable.”
Direct and difficult challenges to the goals world leaders so triumphantly announced in 2015 now seem everywhere. The rise of austerity. The backlash against egalitarian and human rights discourses and movements. The worsening climate crisis “threatening our very existence.” Both this bluntness from Guterres and the UN Research Institute’s new report reflect somewhat of a desperate desire for the sort of debate the world’s rich and powerful—and the nations they call home—so desperately want to avoid.
The first approach threatened the privileged status of the world’s wealthiest. The second ignored it. The second won out—by setting targets for the Sustainable Development Goals, Fukuda-Parr explains, that “do not take into account the distribution of wealth within and between countries or make reference to extreme inequality.”
This narrow perspective on inequality would end up dominating the negotiations. The problem? By conflating “inequality” and “poverty,” as Fukuda-Parr helps us understand, those negotiators most defensive about their home nation’s extreme concentrations of income and wealth had come up with a global framework that “excludes from the narrative the problems of extreme inequality and the power of the wealthy.
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