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The deadliest form of violence is poverty. You cannot work for one day with the violent people who fill our prisons and mental hospitals for the criminally insane without being forcible and constantly reminded of the extreme poverty and discrimination that characterizes their lives. Hearing about their lives, and about their families and friends, you are forced to recognize the truth in Gandhi’s observation that the deadliest form of violence is poverty. Not a day goes by without realizing that trying to understand them and their violent behavior in purely individual terms is impossible and wrong-headed. Any theory of violence, especially a psychological theory, that evolves from the experience of men in maximum security prisons and hospitals for the criminally insane must begin with the recognition that these institutions are only microcosms. They are not where the major violence in our society takes place, and the perpetrators who fill them are far from being the main causes of most violent deaths. Any approach to a theory of violence needs to begin with a look at the structural violence in this country. Focusing merely on those relatively few men who commit what we define as murder could distract us from examining and learning from those structural causes of violent death that are far more significant from a numerical or public health, or human, standpoint. By “structural violence” I mean the increased rates of death, and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted with the relatively lower death rates experienced by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society’s collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting “structural” with “behavioral violence,” by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from behavioral violence in at least three major respects. *The lethal effects of structural violence operate continuously, rather than sporadically, whereas murders, suicides, executions, wars, and other forms of behavioral violence occur one at a time. *Structural violence operates more or less independently of individual acts; independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political parties, voters) whose decisions may nevertheless have lethal consequences for others. *Structural violence is normally invisible, because it may appear to have had other (natural or violent) causesThe finding that structural violence causes far more deaths than behavioral violence does is not limited to this country. Kohler and Alcock attempted to arrive at the number of excess deaths caused by socioeconomic inequities on a worldwide basis. Sweden was their model of the nation that had come closes to eliminating structural violence. It had the least inequity in income and living standards, and the lowest discrepancies in death rates and life expectancy; and the highest overall life expectancy in the world. When they compared the life expectancies of those living in the other socioeconomic systems against Sweden, they found that 18 million deaths a year could be attributed to the “structural violence” to which the citizens of all the other nations were being subjected. During the past decade, the discrepancies between the rich and poor nations have increased dramatically and alarmingly. The 14 to 18 million deaths a year caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as World War II (an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those by genocide—or about eight million per year, 1939-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000) deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million, 1954-1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to compare with structural violence, which continues year after year. In other words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of violence—structural or behavioral—is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to each other, as cause to effect.

The United States cannot prosper and remain a vigorous democracy when so few have so much and so many have so little. While many of my congressional colleagues choose to ignore it, the issue of income and wealth inequality is one of the great moral, economic and political crises that we face – and it must be dealt with. The unfortunate reality is that we are moving rapidly toward an oligarchic form of society, where a handful of billionaires have enormous wealth and power while working families have been struggling in a way we have not seen since the Great Depression. This situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Today, half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, 500,000 of the very poorest among us are homeless, millions are worried about evictions, 92 million are uninsured or underinsured, and families all across the country are worried about how they are going to feed their kids. Today, an entire generation of young people carry an outrageous level of student debt and face the reality that their standard of living will be lower than their parents’. And, most obscenely, low-income Americans now have a life expectancy that is about 15 years lower than the wealthy. Poverty in America has become a death sentence. Meanwhile, the people on top have never had it so good. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 92%, and the 50 wealthiest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 165 million people. While millions of Americans have lost their jobs and incomes during the pandemic, over the past year 650 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by $1.3tn. The growing gap between the very rich and everyone else is nothing new. Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America. In 1978, the top 0.1% owned about 7% of the nation’s wealth. In 2019, the latest year of data available, they own nearly 20%. Unbelievably, the two richest people in America, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, now own more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans combined. If income inequality had not skyrocketed over the past four decades and had simply stayed static, the average worker in America would be earning $42,000 more in income each year. Instead, as corporate chief executives now make over 300 times more than their average employees, the average American worker now earns $32 a week less than he or she did 48 years ago – after adjusting for inflation. In other words, despite huge increases in technology and productivity, ordinary workers are actually losing ground. Addressing income and wealth and inequality will not be easy, because we will be taking on some of the most powerful and well-financed entities in the country, including Wall Street, the health insurance industry, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial-complex. But it must be done. Here is some of what Congress and the president can do in the very near future. We must raise the minimum wage from the current starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to a living wage of at least $15 an hour. A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it. We need to make it easier, not harder, for workers to join unions. The massive increase in wealth and income inequality can be directly linked to the decline in union membership in America. 

The fastest rate of inflation in 40 years is hurting families across the U.S. who are seeing ever-higher prices for everything from meat and potatoes to housing and gasoline. But behind the headline number that’s been widely reported is something that often gets overlooked: Inflation affects different households in different ways – and sometimes hurts those with the least, the most. Inflation, as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is designed to track the price increases in a typical U.S. household’s basket of goods. The problem is spending bundles differ across households. For example, a family in the lowest 20% of income typically spends around 15% of their budget on groceries – this is nearly 60% more than households in the top 20% of the income distribution, according to my calculations. The widening inflation gap On Jan. 12, 2022, the BLS released figures showing that inflation jumped by 7% in December from a year earlier – the fastest pace since 1982. To see how this varied across households, I used the bureau’s own price data and factored in the typical spending habits of different income groups. I calculate that inflation is running at 7.2% for the lowest income households – higher than for any other group. For the highest income families, the rate of change was 6.6%. The difference between the two income groups steadily increased throughout 2021, starting the year at just 0.16 percentage point but ending at 0.6 percentage point – near the highest it has been since 2010. The reason for this widening rich-poor inflation gap, known by economists as inflation inequality, comes down to the typical spending habits of people in each income group. In times of economic uncertainty and recession, most households tend to hold back on buying luxury goods. But by and large, people can’t cut down on necessities such as groceries and heating – although wealthier consumers are better placed to stock up on these necessities when prices are cheap. This shift of spending away from luxury items like vacations and new cars, and toward necessities, pushes inflation up for poorer families more than richer ones. This is because lower-income households dedicate a higher percentage of their income on necessities. My data shows that this inflation gap tends to be widest in times of recession or in the early stages of economic recovery. In the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the gap in inflation rates between the lowest and highest income groups was close to 1 percentage point – higher than it is now.

Climate change is not the only form of environmental damage we are inflicting upon the Earth. Might we face other environmental existential risks through overpopulation, running out of critical resources or biodiversity loss?

When environmentalism rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, one major concern was overpopulation. It was widely feared that humanity’s rapidly growing population would far outstrip the Earth’s capacity to feed people, precipitating an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. The most prominent advocate of this view, Paul Ehrlich, painted an apocalyptic vision of the near future: “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born.”93 This catastrophe would come soon and pose a direct existential risk. Ehrlich predicted: “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come—and by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”94

Donald Trump peddled an economic fallacy in Monday night’s Presidential debate by suggesting that Mexico’s value added tax, or VAT, gives its producers an advantage over American companies. He said, “When we sell into Mexico, there’s a tax – automatic, 16 percent, approximately. When they sell to us, there is no tax.”

Yes, Mexico has a VAT and the United States does not. And VATs around the world are border adjustable – exports are exempt and imports are taxable. But that does not give Mexican producers a leg up over their US competitors.

These same voices often claim that doubling American production is a moral imperative, not simply a market opportunity. They say people will go hungry if U.S. farmers don’t respond (see sidebar). In some cases, they imply or even say outright that the collateral damage to natural resources, the environment, human health and ecosystems that would result from meeting this moral imperative would be regrettable but unavoidable. Finally, they argue that “modern” farming systems that rely heavily on biotechnology, fertilizers and chemicals are the only way U.S. farmers can meet this challenge, and that hewing to more agro-ecological methods of producing agricultural bounty will put countless people at risk of hunger and malnutrition.

Many farmers sincerely believe this. Others use this scenario more cynically to pursue political or business objectives. In either case, the “moral imperative” to feed the world has become an important rationale for maintaining the status quo in U.S. farm policy. It has also been deployed to deflect attention from the damage that “modern” agriculture does to the environment and human health, and to discredit calls for reform.

The third dimension on which research differs has to do with the social scale that is being studied. By social scale, I mean the degree of coordination among individuals and organizational resources needed to undertake collective action. Environmental variables may affect an individual's propensity to resort to violence and crime (Rotton & Cohn, 2003); relatively unorganized protests and riots (Hendrix & Salehyan, 2012); rebellion by organized, armed actors (Burke et al., 2009); and international conflict between states (Tir & Stinnett, 2012). Results for one type of social phenomenon may not be commensurable with other types of behavior. Moreover, causal relationships are likely to differ; the causal chain leading from water scarcity to communal conflict between farmers and pastoralists may look very different when examining conflict between nation-states over water resources. The same variables that influence conflict between states, which are highly organized entities, may not apply to conflict between individuals and vice-versa. To illustrate how social scale matters, take for example a pair of studies by Hendrix and Salehyan (see Hendrix and Salehyan, 2012, Salehyan and Hendrix, 2014). In the first study (Hendrix & Salehyan, 2012), we show that abnormally high and abnormally low levels of rainfall, which can both disrupt normal agricultural practices, predict social conflict events such as sporadic protests and riots. These types of unrest are usually short-lived, require relatively little sustained commitment, and have limited degrees of organization. By contrast, armed conflict—which requires a long-term commitment by ‘professional’ militant organizations—declines during periods of low rainfall and resource scarcity (Salehyan & Hendrix, 2014). Such groups need food and supplies in order to maintain a rebel army, and find it more difficult to sustain their operations under conditions of environmental distress. Thus, in looking at different scales of social organization, the effect of a similar set of independent variables may differ.

Despite this work, there is a disjunction between scholarly research on environmental conflict and often-heard assertions in journalistic accounts and policy papers. The main purpose of this article is to close this gap by engaging in discussion with the policy community. While many in academia have been cautious about their claims, policy activists – seeking to underscore the urgent need to take action on climate change – continue to make dire predictions about looming ‘resource wars’, often basing their arguments on speculation or shoddy research. In this article, I also encourage researchers to incorporate theoretically informed political variables into their models of environmental conflict and call on the academic community to better communicate their findings to general audiences.

Let me be clear: climate change certainly presents a major challenge to economies, social relations, and livelihoods, and action must be taken quickly to attenuate its negative impacts and to adapt to this reality. That said, claims of environmental determinism leading seamlessly from climate change to open warfare are suspect. The overly structural logic linking climate change to armed conflict ignores human agency, ingenuity, the potential for technological innovation, and the vital role of political institutions in managing conflict (or failing to do so). Additionally, ignoring the role that governments play in managing and redistributing resources, as well as mediating conflict, leads to incorrect predictions and policy prescriptions, and allows decisionmakers to shift blame for civil wars and grave human rights violations. If scholars are serious about informing policy debates (see Mack, 2002), then communicating more effectively with the policy community is critical.

Although public polling on immigration shows a strong shift to the left, survey responses in that vein mask a far more complicated reality. Over and over again, immigration has proved to be politically problematic for Democrats. As far back as 2007, when he was chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Rahm Emanuel warned that immigration had become the new “third rail of American politics.” Mary C. Waters, a sociologist at Harvard whose work focuses “on the integration of immigrants and their children, the transition to adulthood for the children of immigrants, intergroup relations, and the measurement and meaning of racial and ethnic identity,” concisely described the immigration paradox in an email: There is a large intensity difference. In 2020 support for immigration was the highest it’s ever been since 1965 when Gallup first asked the questions. But the people who are opposed to immigration are really opposed. While those “who favor immigration favor a lot of other issues,” Waters continued, those who are deeply opposed see immigration as an existential threat. As a national issue immigration motivates anti-immigrant voters in a single-minded way, but pro-immigration voters have a long list of things they support. In that way it works for the right.

They claim VAT would be a substitute for income tax, but we know politicians will never get rid of any tax

The misguided valued-added tax seems like a magic money-making bullet to the nation’s deficit problems. The Tax Foundation estimates that Sen. Ted Cruz’s 16% VAT would net $25 trillion over the next decade. Sen. Rand Paul proposes a 14.5% “business activity tax” that would operate much like a European value-added tax or VAT.

During the first 2020 Democratic presidential primary debate, candidate Andrew Yang claimed that his Universal Basic Income (UBI) proposal of $1,000 per month per person per year could be paid for with a Value-Added Tax (VAT) at half the levels of the average European country. While a VAT of some level could certainly pay for a UBI, it appears it would need to be much higher than Yang claims, or else coupled with other tax and spending changes.

According to estimates from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, implementing a UBI in the U.S. at $6,000 would cost about $1.5 trillion annually, so a UBI at double that amount would likely cost about $3 trillion per year. This means that even if his VAT raised $800 billion, Yang's proposal would only be a little more than one-quarter paid for.

In theory, new technologies can have several different effects on human workers. They can:

reduce demand for human workers by replacing their labor,

Specifically, AI is not nearly as powerful as widely believed and is unlikely to supplant humans in the foreseeable future. Jobs are not disappearing but even if they eventually do, individuals will have time to increase the parts of their real income/consumption that stem from subsistence, proprietorship, and financial investment. Even if individuals do desire to increase unilateral transfers as a percentage of their income portfolios, they may, in conjunction with policymakers, prefer other types of transfers over UBI, which suffers from several conceptual problems. Finally, in the unlikely scenario that AI ever proves rapidly destructive, rich countries can adopt immediate fiscal measures simulating a UBI.

To put it bluntly, we think the fear, and the guilt, are probably mostly unwarranted. No one knows, of course, but we suspect that AI is far more likely to complement and empower human workers than to impoverish them or displace them onto the welfare rolls. This doesn’t mean we’re starry-eyed Panglossians; we realize that this optimistic perspective is a tough sell, and even if our vision comes true, there will certainly be some people who lose out. But what we’ve seen so far about how generative AI works suggests that it’ll largely behave like the productivity-enhancing, labor-saving tools of past waves of innovation.

AI doesn’t take over jobs, it takes over tasks

The Finnish study is the most recent and thorough case study on the topic and, as such, should be relied upon as the go-to data. Participants in this study received 560 euros ($600) per month from 2017 to 2018. Those included were part of a randomly selected group of 2,000 jobless people between the ages of 25 and 58. The funds they received included no strings attached. The study’s original aim was to examine how the social security system could be reshaped to promote active employment participation by giving people a stronger incentive to work. In short, would giving unemployed individuals a basic income increase the national employment rate? The answer is no. The landmark trial concluded that Universal Basic Income would bring happiness, but it would not boost the job market. The basic income improved the mental well-being of recipients, making them feel more secure with their finances. However, it did not show that it would activate people at the lower ranks of society to seek self-reliance. “In simple terms, the idea was to test if the carrot works better than the stick in encouraging the unemployed to accept new job offers and to seek income from entrepreneurial activities. With that respect, the results were disappointing. Basic income recipients did not have more workdays or higher incomes than those in the control group. Despite the fact that basic income recipients had clearly better incentives to work, there were no statistically significant differences between the groups. The results show that among the young and the long-term unemployed other obstacles for work, such as outdated skills and health issues, are more important than financial incentives.”

Maybe UBI will free everyone to get training and make a dramatic leap up the income ladder. But prior UBI-like programs, such as the Negative Income Tax experiments of the 1970s, resulted in negative effects in terms of work and earnings. More recent trials show neutral to slightly negative impacts on work. But confidence in these experiments is low due to small sample sizes, low external validity, or convoluted designs. Participants also know these free checks are not going to last forever, so quitting a job to pursue “whatever,” to use Pelosi’s term, would make little sense. Yang’s permanent program could displace far more work. At the very least, it begs broad testing before jumping off the UBI cliff. Another cause for concern is the staggering cost of UBI: giving every US adult $12,000 each year would cost roughly $3 trillion annually, equal to about three quarters of all current federal expenditures. With the federal government already operating trillion-dollar deficits and unable to pay for currently-promised entitlements, that would require tax hikes that spook even normal tax hike advocates: “A UBI that’s financed primarily by tax increases would require the American people to accept a level of taxation that vastly exceeds anything in U.S. history. It’s hard to imagine that such a UBI would advance very far, especially given the tax increases we’ll already need for Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure, and other needs.” But the universality of UBI is what really sets it apart from past efforts to boost family incomes. Instead of growing refundable tax credits for lower income workers to “make work pay,” or even adding more “near poor” people to the welfare rolls, the new money in UBI heads for people with middle and higher incomes. That points to the ultimate irony of UBI — it would worsen inequality by shifting federal spending higher up the income ladder. That seems unlikely to become law, or if it somehow did, would not last long as budget cutters target payments to upper income households. Yang suggests it would take a constitutional amendment to curtail his UBI, but Congress could have other ideas. In that case, “universal basic income” could quickly become just “basic income” for the poor — that is, a massive new welfare program that supplants work. Either way, that’s a bad idea that risks more harm than good.

A study published this week sheds doubt on ambitious claims made for universal basic income (UBI), the scheme that would give everyone regular, unconditional cash payments that are enough to live on. Its advocates claim it would help to reduce poverty, narrow inequalities and tackle the effects of automation on jobs and income. Research conducted for Public Services International, a global trade union federation, reviewed for the first time 16 practical projects that have tested different ways of distributing regular cash payments to individuals across a range of poor, middle-income and rich countries, as well as copious literature on the topic. It could find no evidence to suggest that such a scheme could be sustained for all individuals in any country in the short, medium or longer term – or that this approach could achieve lasting improvements in wellbeing or equality. The research confirms the importance of generous, non-stigmatising income support, but everything turns on how much money is paid, under what conditions and with what consequences for the welfare system as a whole. From Kenya and southern India to Alaska and Finland, cash payment schemes have been claimed to show that UBI “works”. In fact, what’s been tested in practice is almost infinitely varied, with cash paid at different levels and intervals, usually well below the poverty line and mainly to individuals selected because they are severely disadvantaged, with funds provided by charities, corporations and development agencies more often than by governments. Experiments in India and Kenya have been funded, respectively, by Unicef and Give Directly, a US charity supported by Google. They give money to people on very low incomes in selected villages for fixed periods of time. Giving small amounts of cash to people who have next to nothing is bound to make a difference – and indeed, these schemes have helped to improve recipients’ health and livelihoods. But nothing is revealed about their longer-term viability, or how they could be scaled up to serve whole populations. And there is a democratic deficit: people who get their basic income from charities or aid agencies have no control over how payments are made, to whom, at what level or over what period of time. The Alaska Permanent Fund, built from the state’s oil revenues, pays all adults and children a dividend each year – in 2018, it was $1,600 (£1,230). The scheme is popular and enduring; it has been found to produce some positive impacts on rural indigenous groups, but it makes no claim to sufficiency and has done nothing to reduce child poverty or to prevent widening income inequalities. Helsinki city centre Finland undertook a two-year trial, from January 2017 to December 2018, of modest monthly payments of €560 (£477) to 2,000 unemployed people – but the government has refused to fund further expansion. It told us little about UBI except that, when push comes to shove, elected politicians may balk at paying for a universal scheme. The cost of a sufficient UBI scheme would be extremely high according to the International Labour Office, which estimates average costs equivalent to 20-30% of GDP in most countries. Costs can be reduced – and have been in most trials – by paying smaller amounts to fewer individuals. But there is no evidence to suggest that a partial or conditional UBI scheme could do anything to mitigate, let alone reverse, current trends towards worsening poverty, inequality and labour insecurity. Costs may be offset by raising taxes or shifting expenditure from other kinds of public expenditure, but either way there are huge and risky trade-offs. Money spent on cash payments cannot be invested elsewhere. The more generous the payments, the wider the range of recipients, the longer the scheme continues, the less money will be left to build the structures and systems that are needed to realise UBI’s progressive goals. As this week’s report observes, “If cash payments are allowed to take precedence, there’s a serious risk of crowding out efforts to build collaborative, sustainable services and infrastructure – and setting a pattern for future development that promotes commodification rather than emancipation.” This may help to explain why UBI has attracted support from Silicon Valley tycoons, who are more interested in defending consumer capitalism than in tackling poverty and inequality.

Innovation has brought us to an inflection point; the coming decade will be decisive

When we gathered in Paris in 2015 to hammer out the historic climate deal, few of us dared hope that by 2021 more than 60 countries—representing over half of global emissions—would have committed to net zero emissions by mid-century. In addition, 4,500 non-state actors, such as companies, cities, regions, and other institutions, have embraced a net zero target. Asset owners and managers are also now stepping up, with over $40 trillion of assets under management committed to net zero portfolios by 2050.

Health is the best indicator for the advancements on the intertwined 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals. The agenda’s principles of equity, sustainability, peace and human rights cannot be fulfilled without equitable health systems based on primary care and fit-for-purpose Science, Technology and Innovation.

Health technologies play a central role in sustainable development

In the first place, growing inequality is most frequently the flip side of growing, not shrinking opportunity. In fact, inequality is the mechanism through which the market generates and spreads innovation, which in turn generates opportunities for millions of individuals. Every innovation has initially generated inequality in incomes, as their inventors exploit it commercially. The inequality, in turn, attracts new innovators, as well as imitators, rapidly spreading the initial innovation and improvements on it. In the process, they generate many new opportunities.

For example, Steve Jobs and Thomas Alva Edison actually created new inventions and enterprises for the sake of putting themselves on the best side of inequality—to make large amounts of money that would increase their income over that of the rest of the population. By being successful, they created inequality not just in their immediate neighborhood but also in the whole country. They became billionaires. Many of their colleagues in Apple and all the Edison companies (General Electric, Consolidated Edison, Commonwealth Edison) also became billionaires in the midst of a society in which just a few people are billionaires. By improving the productivity of others, however, their innovations created millions of new opportunities across nations and continents. Even people who suffer when seeing that others get rich have to recognize that seeing Jobs and Edison becoming billionaires was a small price to pay for the enormous opportunities they created in the whole world.