“Dear world leaders.” So begins an open letter addressed by more than 500 economists and inequality experts to the heads of state and government of the 20 largest economic powers, who will meet on November 22 and 23 in South Africa for the G20 summit. The first will take place on this continent which America’s Donald Trump and Argentina’s Javier Milei decided to skip.
Experts from more than 70 countries across a wide range of disciplines – economists, sociologists, epidemiologists, historians, geographers, anthropologists, political scientists and philosophers – asked for their support for the creation of an international group on inequality, based on modeling carried out on climate with the IPCC. The independent and non-partisan Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides this “a neutral, scientific and objective assessment of climate change”.
Therefore, they took one of the main recommendations from the G20’s first report on global inequality, written by a committee led by American Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and whose conclusions will be presented at the summit. This initiative is supported by the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, as well as dozens of figures including Janet Yellen, former American Treasury Secretary and President of the Federal Reserve (The Fed), or economists Daron Acemoglu, Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, Lucas Chancel, François Bourguignon…
“High levels of economic inequality negatively impacting all aspects of human life and progress, including our economy, our democracy, and the survival of the planet,” they consider in the letter. They expressed deep concern about it “Extreme concentrations of wealth result in undemocratic concentrations of power, which undermine public trust and polarize our politics”. Without mentioning the United States. And signal to leaders that inequality is not inevitable, but it is a “political choice”. “Clear and proven steps can be taken to reduce these and build a more equal society and economy, which is an important foundation for a prosperous future for us all,” they concluded.
