10 — Reduced Inequalities
What are the 17 UN SDG’s?
“The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.” — The United Nations
Goal #10, envisioning a future with significantly reduced inequalities.
UN’s goal
#10 consists of many smaller goals that work together to make the bigger picture come together, including:
- By 2030, progressively achieve and sustain income growth of the bottom 40% of the population at a rate higher than the national average.
- By 2030, empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status.
- Ensure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities of outcome, including by eliminating discriminatory laws, policies and practices and promoting appropriate legislation, policies and action in this regard
- Adopt policies, especially fiscal, wage and social protection policies, and progressively achieve greater equality.
- Improve the regulation and monitoring of global financial markets and institutions and strengthen the implementation of such regulations.
- Facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies.
***These are just some of the milestones the goal is trying to reach. Read more about Goal 10 here.***
What are Inequalities
The word “inequalities” in this context refers to inequalities both within and amongst countries. It’s often agreed that inequalities are measured by income/material wealth.
There are two types of inequalities that most people confuse: Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. These two are highly correlated and can each reveal something about the other, as explained in the next few paragraphs.
Inequality of opportunity
This can be considered to be a person’s birth circumstances. For example, their race, gender, geographical location, state laws, ..etc. These are factors that are very hard to change about an individual and greatly contribute in determining their ‘outcome’, which we will talk about in just a bit.
Amartya Sen’s Capability Framework
In the late 1970s, a new framework was introduced to shape how we think about inequality: Amartya Sen’s capability framework. It emphasized that it’s ineffective to measure the problem using its effects. So if we approach it that way, well-being should not be measured by material wealth and income. It also assumes that everyone converts their wealth into ‘a state of well-being’ in the same way. Instead, well-being should be measured by the capability and freedom to choose one life over another. i.e. have the opportunity to choose your way of life just as much as anyone else without any ‘non-moral’ barriers standing in your way.
Inequality of outcome
Inequalities of outcome refer to people being unequal in their material wealth and living conditions. It’s their current living state. SDG #10 is mainly concerned with inequalities in standards of living, such as inequalities in income/wealth, education, health, and nutrition. A complicated and uncertain process is required to measure, and index standards of living themselves. So economists found it more worthwhile to gauge living standards using either income or consumption.
Outcomes can usually be defined by two main factors: Circumstances and effort.
- Circumstances — Factors an individual has no control over. i.e., sex, race, geographical location…etc.
- Effort — The amount of ‘effort’ an individual dedicates to be able to sustain themselves and their standard of living.
It can be used to measure equality of opportunity, as opportunity greatly affects the outcome. But that strategy isn’t completely accurate as the individual effort each individual puts in is a variable that’s hard to measure and consider in the equation.
What is the problem?
Inequalities can be observed in all kinds of areas where individuals can be different, from geographical location to gender.
Income & Wealth Inequality
Studies show that (income) inequality is on the rise. In 1980, 1% of the population was generating 16% of global income, vs. the world’s 380 richest individuals having as much wealth as the bottom half of the globe in 2009 according to inequality.org.
Even though lots of progress was seen in terms of eliminating poverty, the economical gap between the richest and poorest is still rising faster than ever due to the huge masses of wealth the richer are accumulating.
So are the overall trends positive or negative? Well, we still can’t tell. There are more than 200 years of data in the field of economic inequalities, but there seems like there are no hard trends to be observed yet…
Though we can safely assume that the situation is worsening since today’s economic inequalities are slightly higher than those from 200 years ago.
COVID-19 Inequality
An example we can use to really understand how this affects people is COVID-19. Many interventions were taken in order to try to appease the COVID-19 crisis, but more in certain places than others. Why? Simply because there isn't much money to be earned from helping poorer locations in the world.
This graph perfectly depicts the global vaccine gap so many experts are warning about. Low-income countries have seen almost no progress compared to countries higher on the economic scale.
Gender Inequality
Although it has certainly seen some progress over the years, in some places more than others, global female income is a lot lower than its male partner.
The current global female-generated income account for 34% of all incomes generated when it should be way closer to 50%. We can attribute this gap to both pay inequality (i.e. women being paid for the same jobs as men) and the lack of women in the workspace. The trend has been mostly positive, but slow, throughout continents except for China.
