The first, of course, is what most authors and pundits focus on when considering this issue.

The
world is sometimes depicted as a giant seesaw, with a few obscenely wealthy people sitting on
one end while the rest of us clutch to the other for dear life. The rich have been getting richer
at a considerably quicker rate than the rest of us, as Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-
First Century (2014) shows, so the seesaw is becoming increasingly unbalanced. Consequently,
inequalities are currently a focal point of the media. There are two striking aspects to the
current discussion. The first is the breadth of those who are losing their temper, which includes
not only the typical culprits but also less well-known lefty agitators like the Pope, the president
of the United States, the head of the International Monetary Fund, and the governor of the
Bank of England. A strong reaction seems like it should be expected.

However, this may not be the case, given the lack of concrete policy proposals is the second
notable thing. There seems to be only one section of Piketty's book that has not been
universally praised, and that is his hypothetical tax on capital. While central bank governor
Mark Carney and international monetary fund managing director Christine Lagarde have made
nebulous calls for wage restraint and "more progressive without being excessive" (whatever
that means) taxation, governments do not appear to be responding. We're left to read
publications like the Financial Times's "How to Spend It" feature, which might as well be a
Trojan Horse plot to incite class conflict. Imagine a world where private planes are just another
method of transportation, where £6,000 is spent on a dress because it looked good on the
model, and where a special premium on luxury ships is a feasible business proposition. There
aren't many individuals who call this place home, but the address is instantly recognizable.

In reality, there is a connection between the skyrocketing wealth of the super-rich and rising
income inequality. If governments in countries with high inequality are under pressure to cut
taxes on the wealthy, that means less money for poverty-fighting programs. Given these
factors, it's a reasonable assumption that we could fix problems by taxing the wealthy. If we
wanted to prohibit tax avoidance, limit pay, or tax capital, for instance, we could do so. Is that a
feasible option? Maybe so. However, it's possible it won't. Who is to say that if governments
make the wealthy poorer through tax or inheritance reforms, the money won't be spent on
missiles, big infrastructure projects, and other things that people don't actually desire and that
won't help to fight extreme poverty? Many questions arise from this narrative and are never
resolved. To begin filling in the blanks, we need to focus not on those at the very top of the
wealth distribution but on those at the very bottom; on the inequities that keep people poor
rather than those that make them affluent.

Try to get another look at that seesaw. You could easily imagine the people on it as a collection
of shards, evenly divided across the two sides. Contrary to popular belief, they are not like that.
No one stumbles into the ranks of the super-rich or the pitifully-poor. Instead, substantial sway
is exerted by the groups to which individuals belong in determining their status. What part of
town do they call home? Do we know what religion or ethnicity they belong to? What kind of
impairment do they have, if any? Where do they stand in your family tree?
Consider the value of acquiring an education. Children around the world who were not in
school dropped by around half between 1999 and 2011. We have some good news. Who, then,
are the kids who fell through the cracks of this educational upturn and didn't benefit from the
wave of change that swept the system? There is a lack of quality information here (of which
more later). Nonetheless, around two-thirds of unschooled children worldwide are expected to
be members of ethnic minorities. I can put that to good use. It looks like the odds are always
stacked against some folks.

Complexity is inherent in the inequality patterns that underlie poverty and marginalization. One
country where this is especially true is Burkina Faso, where only around a third of children
reach this milestone. There is a lot of information to sort through in order to learn about the
challenges encountered by the two-thirds of the population that does not go to school. The
gender gap is obviously at play here, as 34% of boys and only 24% of girls graduate high school.
However, the largest disparities here are not of a sexist nature.

It is even more noteworthy that while 8 percent of children in the most distant Sahel region
complete basic school, 53 percent of youngsters in the country's core region do so. Only 3% of
people from the minority Tuareg ethnic group complete elementary school. Governments must
recognize the underlying pattern of inequities in national statistics if they are to enhance
education and ensure that all children have access to it. Then they won't be able to make the
most of their funds, public awareness efforts, political capital, or anything else.

It has been shown that when governments are motivated to address inequality, doing so on the
basis of groups yields remarkable outcomes. Take Bolivia, for example, one of the most unequal
countries in the world. Evo Morales's administration took office in 2005 on the promise of
reducing the country's extreme inequality. In Bolivia, racial disparities in poverty are all too real,
with indigenous people experiencing rates of poverty that are roughly double those of the
white population.

Morales promised to address the racial components of economic disparity. The federal
government initiated a cash transfer initiative. The government prioritized road construction to
connect the outlying communities where indigenous people reside. It has begun initiatives to
increase the number of native speakers employed by the government and to encourage more
native languages to be studied at the tertiary level. Both extreme poverty and inequality have
been steadily decreasing in Bolivia as a result of these policies. Between 2001 and 2011, income
inequality in Bolivia decreased by 15.0 percentage points as measured by the Gini coefficient.