INEQUALITY, POVERTY, AND HUMANITYRaden Abdul Hafizh Zainulloh

2016

Human is the most socio-complex creature throughout the history of earth, there are no other

creatures which is very complex yet acknowledge their complexity by simplified it in poems, mathematical formulas, songs, etc. Even the simple thing we have would be processed along with the complex one. Alan Watts (1957) said in his book, “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.” Perhaps what we need is just relax and let it be, but how can we do that if we are already complex like this? Well, let’s put aside that problem and back to the title, inequality, poverty, and humanity. This socio-complex creature is actually create many problems because of their own complexity, the basic value and social system of humanity is getting rigid and sticky, not easily removed or changed, eventually generate new condition of humanity, some of the conditions is inequality and poverty, we accept this kind of conditions in our society because it’s either necessary to our system or we can’t remove it by present system, both are the best answer you could get.

Inequality is a condition where one or many aspects of human life (e.g. culture, social status, income, etc.) is doesn’t being distributed very well, by any means not every human get the portions. Meanwhile, poverty is a condition where individual or many peoples couldn’t get primary goods (basic needs for human e.g. food, shelter) to continuing their life, in some case poverty also comes as condition where individual or group of peoples doesn’t being accepted socially by others. Inequality and poverty does have unique connection, because without inequality there wouldn’t be poverty exist, in addition if there’s no poverty that means in the first place there’s absences of inequality. As the definition of poverty itself, a condition where individual or many peoples couldn’t get primary goods, this means there is deficiency of income distribution among country, also economic growth problems which affect the unemployment rate and income too. Whereas if individual or society doesn’t being accepted socially by others is the problem by inequality too, but from culture or social status lack of tolerance and information, then form social inequality. The relationship of inequality, poverty, and growth have created something called The Poverty, Inequality, and Growth Triangle as François Bourguignon (2004) specified, “The Poverty-Growth-Inequality Triangle model differs from previous models of poverty in that it looks at the interactions between growth and inequality, rather than considering the two separately. The Poverty-Growth-Inequality Triangle model implies that reducing poverty requires a combination of country-wide policies focused on growth and country-wide policies focused on reducing inequality. Development strategies that focus on only one of these miss opportunities to reduce absolute poverty.” Thus we can settle that poverty is having a strong relationship with growth and inequality. Correspondently with the statement we could take inequality as the major factor that influence those two other variables, why? Growth has the power to control poverty, especially in incomes, when economic growth is increasing it’s because aggregate incomes is increasing, it would be likely to decrease poverty but aggregately, the thing we need is income to be distributed equally to reduce poverty significantly. So, inequality would be the boundaries for economic growth to reduce poverty, as Radhicka Kapoor (2014) mentioned, “The level of inequality determines what the share of the poor in the growth process will be. In countries with high initial inequality, the poor tend to have a lower share of the gains from growth. This suggests that high initial inequality could hurt the pace of poverty reduction by lowering the growth elasticity of poverty reduction.” (p. 7).

By far we already know then, the connection between inequality and poverty, correspondingly the power of inequality to become the boundaries for economic growth to reduce poverty. Hence, we can conclude that inequality must be the first thing to be solved if we wanted to expand our nation toward developed nation also poverty-less nation. Come again to think about it, the best system to erase any inequality is socialism and authority system but by far those two didn’t quite solve the problem of ‘human free-will’ or rights for freedom, so maybe we need egality rather than equality to create a much more ‘human’ system perhaps? But, that means an extreme social leveling system in our own society, it’s effective but only if the government and its people have ‘bloodline’ relationship just like mafia or ant colony. Possibly we need inequality but by controlling it just like the government now controlling inflation and deflation, neither far too unequal nor equal, we just need it in steady state. Sometimes we need to coexist with the problems, so that we will appreciate the joy we already had, ironic? Yes, indeed, but that’s how human are, so complex that we agree to allow some problems to exist.

2INEQUALITY, POVERTY, AND HUMANITY

RADEN ABDUL HAFIZH ZAINULLOH2016

REFERENCES

Bourguignon, F. (2004). The Poverty-Growth-Inequality Triangle. World Bank Website.

Kapoor, R. (2014). Inequality Matters. ICRIER, 7.

Watts, A. (1957). The Way of Zen. New York: Pantheon Books.

3INEQUALITY, POVERTY, AND HUMANITY

RADEN ABDUL HAFIZH ZAINULLOH2016