ABSTRACT
The data on contemporary human inequality are dramatic and widely known. Now about a third of the world population-1.3 billion peoplelive on incomes of less than one dollar a day. Taking two dollars per day as the poverty line, 2.8 billion out of 6 billion people lived in poverty in the early 1990s.1 The UN Development Program (UNDP) reports:
Consider the relative income shares of the richest and poorest 20% of the world’s people. Between 1960 and 1991 the share of the richest 20% rose from 70% of global income to 85%—while that of the poorest declined from 2.3% to 1.4%. So, the ratio of the shares of the richest and the poorest increased from 30:1 to 61:1 . . . by 1991 more than 85% of the world’s population received only 15% of its income.2
