1. Inequality: its causes, consequences and how to reduce it
Edward Webster
Southern Centre of Inequality Studies
University of Witwatersrand

2. Inequality of what?
There are at least three quite different kinds of inequality, (Goran Therborn,2006)
The first is inequality of health and death, what might be called vital inequality
The second is existential inequality, which hits the individual as a person. This form of inequality means denial of (equal) recognition and respect, and is a potent generator of humiliations - for women in patriarchal societies, for indigenous groups in the Americas, for poor immigrants, for those of low caste, and for black people or stigmatised ethnic groups..
The third is material or resource inequality, which means that human actors have very different resources to draw upon. There are two aspects here. The first is access to education, to social contacts, to what is called "social capital" (in conventional discussions, this is often referred to as "inequality of opportunity"). The second is inequality of rewards (often referred to as "inequality of outcome". The latter is the most frequently used measure of inequality – income and wealth

3. South Africa in perspective
Sources: World Bank 2018

4. Increasing inequality globally
In the first half of the 1970s, the distance in life-expectancy at birth between sub-Saharan Africa and high-income countries was twenty- five and a half years; by the early 2000s it was thirty years
GDP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa, measured in terms of domestic purchasing-power, was in 1973 about 8% of the United States’; by 2005, this had dropped to 5%. Within the US, the richest 1% appropriated an 8% share of total household income in 1980; by 2000, this had grown to 17%. In Britain, the richest 1% received 6% of all income in 1980; by 2000, the figure was  about 12.5%
The citizenship premium you get from being born in a richer country is in essence a rent – a citizenship rent (Branko Milanovic,2016)

5. Causes of deepening inequality
The first is the extension of markets accompanying globalisation and neoliberalism , which has increased both the pool of rewards and the competition for star talent. Accelerated by the lifting of controls on capital movements in the 1980s, the expansion of transnational investment, and the emergence of a global executive and professional market – from vice-chancellors to football stars and rugby coaches .
The second process is the increasing autonomy of financial capitalism from what is still called the "real economy". This is something particularly pronounced in Wall Street and the City of London, and their Anglosphere emulators. Since the late 1990s this has turned capitalist finance into a gigantic casino where the trade is in currencies, "securities", and "derivatives".

6. Towards a Southern Approach
A theory of inequality in the global South has been developed by Jessé Souza (2007).
He argues that societies in the global South can only be understood against the background of colonialism and modernization programmes.
Established an unequal structure between the centre and the rest. Souza deviates from dependency theory by his focus on the symbolic dimension.
This system also informs national and local inequality by establishing a racism that declares characteristics of the modern centre (such as white skin, urban residence, Western education) as superior and characteristics of the underdeveloped periphery as inferior.
Thereby, inequality in a postcolonial society is legitimized

7. Inequality is a power relationship
Inequality is not just about the uneven possession or quantitative difference in which individuals, groups, regions, or other entities are placed. It is about the conditions that allow certain groups to dominate over others. Inequality is a power relationship. (Manoranjan Mohanty ,2018)
Indeed, power is produced and reproduced at the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality and other aspects of identity. An intersectional approach is necessary in order to understand the way in which these different dimensions of power interact to reproduce inequality.
Resistance to the powerful emerges through building organisations and social movements of counter power
Need to distinguish between two kinds of forces that drive inequality down (Branko Milanovic, 2016): malign forces (wars, natural catastrophes, epidemics), and benign forces ( more widely accessible education, increased social transfers- MGNREGA-, progressive taxation).