Kenan Malik tells us that global inequality is just ridiculously high and something ought to be done about it. He’s right of course:

The 30 poorest countries in the world, with a combined population of almost a billion, have vaccinated on average barely 2% of their population. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo the figure is 0.1%, in Haiti 0.24%, in Chad 0.27%, in Tanzania 0.36%. “Living with the virus” will mean something very different in such countries than it will in the west.

There is though a problem with this observation - why is this true? Not that it is true, but why?

For the same inequalities exist for other forms of health care. The same inequalities exist in the calories on the table each evening, in the lack of or existence of holes in the ceiling that let the rain in and the number of shirts available to clothe nakedness. The reason being that some places and people are very much poorer than others.

We do not face simply a vaccine inequality, but a more general economic one. That more general problem being the one to solve as each of the individual inequalities will close as we do that. As Robert Colville points out:

Indeed, when the UN millennium summit set a target of halving extreme poverty (an income of below $1.25 a day) by 2015, it was through the opening of developing countries to global trade that this was achieved five years early. It was growth led by a mixture of western consumerism and developing world industrialisation, not “degrowth”, that transformed lives for the better in the poorest nations.

That being the great truth of these recent decades. It’s the one large and important truth of recent decades in fact:

If you care about people, the economic growth over the last generation is one of the most important stories in all 5,000 years of human civilization. Every economic issue discussed in our recent election cycle pales in comparison.

....Our world has, over your lifetime, undergone the greatest reduction in poverty and misery in human history. Heck, more people have been lifted out of poverty over that time than in all the rest of human history.

We can see this in the tabulations of how many poor there are out there. We can also note what it was that caused this. As Colville is far too polite and refined to point out in these words it was that globalised neoliberalism red in tooth and claw. The gross exploitation by the capitalist classes of the consumers of the world in pursuit of profit. These are the things which have reduced that absolute and abject poverty. In order to do more such reduction we need to do more allowing of those powerful economic forces - the forces which achieve the goal it is at least claimed we desire.

Global inequality has indeed fallen these recent decades as a result. And, by the very nature of these things, as that does then all the more specific inequalities - of gender, of access to contraception, vaccines, health care, education, nutrition, of life - reduce too. For that’s what economic growth is, the ability to have more of these things.

To reduce inequality further we need to have more of what has been reducing inequality - globalised neoliberalism.