How the Facebook Generation Keeps People Poor

Excerpt from "How the Facebook Generation Keeps People Poor"

The development model pursued in most countries is a highly unequal one, favouring wealthy groups and the aspirant middle class by promoting capital- and knowledge-intensive growth. There are other growth models that favour the poorest more – to combat inequality, economic policy needs to encourage job creation and opportunities for the poorest, including largescale investments in free or affordable basic services. But such policies are unlikely to be chosen if they prejudice the opportunities of the Facebook generation to live like their “peers” in richer countries (which they would do if they led to slower growth in wealth and wages for the already affluent).

You can read as many reports about inequality as you want (and there are lots) but the most important barrier to the introduction of pro-poor economic strategies is quite simple: lack of political will. What are the chances of the Peruvian (4 million users, 13% of the population) or Senegalese (360,000 users, 2.5% of the population) educated classes deciding to forgo the luxuries that their Facebook peers in the west (even the not very educated ones) discuss online? A car. Frequent trips abroad. The latest gadgets. Answer: about as much chance as those of us who already take all these things for granted deciding to give them up.

In the better off “middle income” countries, home to two-thirds of the world’s poorest people, the Facebook generation has done well out of the last 20 years. But their fortunes contrast with the huge numbers of people still living in abject poverty in city slums or further out in the countryside. In 55% of middle-income countries inequality has increased since the 1990s, and in a further 20% it has remained high, decreasing in only a quarter of middle-income countries – according to the World Bank.

Are we witnessing the emergence of a new type of polarisation, not between countries as before, but between international income brackets?