{"id":60340,"date":"2026-11-02T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/?p=60340"},"modified":"2026-11-02T17:40:45","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T20:40:45","slug":"the-inequality-we-have-learned-to-live-with","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/the-inequality-we-have-learned-to-live-with\/","title":{"rendered":"The inequality we have learned to live with"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On December 10, 2025, the World Inequality Lab, affiliated with the Paris School of Economics, published the World Inequality Report 2026<\/em>. Coordinated by Lucas Chancel, Ricardo G\u00f3mez-Carrera, Rowaida Moshrif, and Thomas Piketty, the report brings together the work of more than 200 researchers affiliated with the World Inequality Database and broadens the traditional understanding of inequality by incorporating, alongside income and wealth, dimensions such as gender, climate, taxation, education, and political representation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why revisit this report now, as 2026 enters its final stretch?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Precisely because inequality should not make the news only on the day a new set of figures is published. Nearly a year after its release, the report offers a different opportunity: to examine its findings with some distance and ask what they mean for Latin America, and particularly for those of us who approach public health through the social conditions in which life unfolds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The World Inequality Report 2026<\/em> forces us to abandon an intellectual comfort: the idea that inequality is an imperfect but inevitable consequence of economic growth. Its central message is more unsettling. Inequality is produced and reproduced through institutions, fiscal rules, labor markets, and power relations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Latin America, this debate is particularly urgent. The region does not need to discover that it is unequal. It needs to ask why, after decades of growth, reforms, and social policies, wealth concentration continues to determine who can live in security and who remains exposed to vulnerability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The global figures are difficult to ignore. The richest 10% receive 53% of global income and own 75% of global wealth. The poorest half receive just 8% of income and control only 2% of wealth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Latin America and the persistence of inequality<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Latin America, the problem takes on a particular intensity. The report estimates that the top 1% receives around 20% of regional income. If we include the next 9%, the richest 10% account for approximately 57%. In Europe, the equivalent share is close to 36%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This comparison says more than any abstract description could. It means that our societies distribute the fruits of economic activity in profoundly different ways. It also means that growth and redistribution are related processes, but they are not equivalent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Latin America has demonstrated that public policies can change this distribution. Since the 1990s, redistributive transfers have helped reduce gaps. Nevertheless, the starting point remains extraordinarily unequal. Before taxes and transfers, the ratio between the average income of the top 10% and the bottom 50% reaches 72 to 1. After redistribution, it falls to 50 to 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a significant reduction and, at the same time, a warning. Transfers can alleviate inequalities produced by the economic system, but they have greater difficulty transforming the structures that generate them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This raises a crucial regional question: to what extent do our states redistribute wealth after inequality has occurred, rather than intervening in the mechanisms that continually reproduce it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When wealth buys time, health, and opportunities<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The report also allows us to move beyond another oversimplification: reducing inequality to wages. Wealth matters because accumulating assets means having security in the face of illness, being able to finance education, access housing, and withstand a crisis without immediately falling into poverty. It also means passing advantages on from one generation to the next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the global extreme, approximately 56,000 adults belonging to the richest 0.001% own three times more wealth than half of humanity. Their share of global wealth increased from around 3.8% in 1995 to almost 6.1% in 2025. Meanwhile, the bottom half remains at approximately 2%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are not simply observing differences between individuals. We are observing radically different capacities to navigate life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is particularly important for those of us working in public health and epidemiology. The ability to eat properly, live in safe housing, study, rest, have time to care for others, or receive healthcare does not begin in the doctor’s office. It begins much earlier, with the social distribution of resources and opportunities. From this perspective, economic inequality can also be understood as an unequal distribution of the ability to produce and protect health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same pattern emerges in gender inequality. In Latin America, women receive around 36% of regional labor income. Globally, women’s share has barely changed between 1990 and 2025, rising from 27.8% to 28.2%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inequality also has a geography<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is another dimension that is particularly relevant to our region: territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People do not experience inequality as a national average. They experience it in the neighborhood where they live, in the public transportation available to them, in the nearby school, in the time it takes to reach a hospital, in the availability of food, and in the employment opportunities within their community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The report specifically links these territorial differences to emerging political divisions. It warns that unequal access to public services, infrastructure, and opportunities can undermine social cohesion and make it more difficult to build redistributive agreements. In Latin America, class conflicts also overlap with regional divisions and historical inequalities rooted in the colonial past. This observation deserves attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An extremely unequal society does not simply distribute its income poorly. It can end up producing such different social experiences that its inhabitants gradually cease to recognize themselves as members of a shared destiny. At that point, inequality is no longer exclusively economic. It becomes social distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those who rely on private education, private healthcare, private transportation, and private security may become increasingly less dependent on collective services. Those who cannot afford these options depend on public institutions that frequently face constraints in terms of resources, coverage, and responsiveness. Between these two worlds, formal citizenship still exists, but the material spaces they share are becoming fewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we are really deciding<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The report argues that taxes and transfers can reduce inequalities, although their impact varies considerably across regions. It also highlights a troubling paradox: tax progressivity can weaken precisely among those who hold the greatest fortunes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Latin America, this necessarily shifts part of the conversation away from poverty and toward distribution. Asking how many people have risen above the poverty line remains essential. But it is no longer enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We must also ask who captures the benefits of growth, who accumulates wealth, who finances the state, who performs care work, which territories receive public investment, and which groups have the greatest capacity to influence collective decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inequality is not simply a matter of some people having more than others. Every society has differences; the problem arises when those differences persistently determine who has access to opportunities, time, education, protection against risk, the means to safeguard their health, and the ability to make their voices heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly a year after its publication, perhaps this is where one of the most important contributions of the World Inequality Report 2026<\/em> to our region lies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It invites us to stop treating inequality as part of the landscape. Latin America knows this landscape all too well. We have described and measured it for decades. The question that remains is a different one: how much inequality are we willing to normalize before recognizing that what we call economic destiny is also shaped by collective decisions?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inequality in Latin America is not an inevitable fate, but a social construct that we have come to accept as the norm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":60314,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16905],"tags":[15635],"gps":[],"class_list":["post-60340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-desigualdad-es-en","tag-debates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60340"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60342,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60340\/revisions\/60342"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60340"},{"taxonomy":"gps","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gps?post=60340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}