Perhaps the most outrageous part of Romney’s deservedly-infamous speech to the $50,000-a-plate dinner was his assertion that he inherited nothing from his upbringing. After all, he was only the son of the CEO of American Motors and then the Governor of Michigan, who went to one of the country’s best prep schools and then to Harvard (where, as Andy Sabl has reminded us, he made ends meet by selling stock): how in the world could anyone think that that gave him anything? He might be as delusional as his running mate, which is saying a lot.
But in that speech he did say one thing that is undeniably true (even if he said it to make an absurd point):
Frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you can have: which is to get born in America.
Absolutely true. In today’s world, a child’s life chances are pervasively determined by which country she is born in. Being born in the United States or the rich countries of Europe is tantamount to winning life’s lottery compared to the rest of the world. Martha Nussbaum a few years ago noted that
A child born in Sweden today has a life expectancy at birth of 79.7 years. A child born in Sierra Leone has a life expectancy at birth of 38.9 years. In the USA, GDP per capita is US$34 142; in Sierra Leone, GDP per capita is US$490. Adult literacy rates in the top 20 nations are around 99%; in Sierra Leone, the literacy rate is 36%. In 26 nations, the adult literacy rate is under 50%.
Suzy Khimm got the numbers last year while reporting on the Occupy Movement’s claim to be the “99%.” True, but only in the United States:
Those at the 34th percentile of income in the United States are at the 90th percentile globally, and those at the 50th percentile in the United States are at the 93rd percentile globally. Even the very poorest Americans — those at the 2nd percentile of income in the United States — are at the 62nd percentile globally.
And this adjusts for relative price levels. Recently the United Nations Development Programme estimated that hunger and malnutrition affect more than 900 million people worldwide — the overwhelmiing majority of them in the Global South.
Note, of course, that using Romney’s words in this way shows the absurdity of his message. Romney was attempting to make the Social Darwinist claim that the distribution of wealth is a function of virtue. In fact, it is anything but: it is essentially a function of luck.
If anything, the Republican Party is doing its best to clamp down on any attempts to change that: the egregious farm bill written by the House GOP leadership increases farm subsidies and removes the small measure of food aid reform contained in the last farm bill. If the “deficit chickenhawks” in the Republican Party get their way, the majority of your food aid tax dollars will continue to go to wealthy US agribusiness and shipping interests, essentially serving as a way to dump food into the Global South and undermine local agriculture.
None of this, of course, should be taken as a reason to stop fighting against inequality in the United States. But inequalities between countries have grown exponentially in the last hundred years: they are now simply too massive to be ignored. US aid policies need to be the next frontier of a vigorous progressivism.
[Cross-posted at The Reality-based Community]
