Can Asia lead the global fight to cure the poverty pandemic as the US lags behind?

Some leaders in the region are showing signs of a new, collective economic conscience that challenges the Wall Street orthodoxy

While Fumio Kishida and Xi Jinping head efforts towards a more equal society, Joe Biden’s attempts to do likewise are crumbling in Congress

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Tom Plate

Tom Plate is a university professor and a veteran columnist focused on Asia and America.

Published: 1:30am, 19 Oct 2021Updated: 3:12am, 19 Oct 2021

Perpetual inequality will only increase if we always look the other way. This is especially so if, as some predictions suggest, the global population hits 10 billion in 2050, with more than 5 billion in Asia alone.

Just as the 2008 financial meltdown oozed over the world with volcanic heat and the 1997 Asian financial crisis unhinged otherwise stable economies, so the grinding dynamic of widening inequality threatens our humanity, sense of justice and psychic equilibrium.

As the French economist Thomas Piketty wrote, “The most obvious characteristic of today’s global inequality regime is that societies around the world are more intensely interdependent than ever before.” It’s a disease – in fact, a poverty pandemic.

The culprit is not Asia. Some leaders in the region are surfacing with a sense of collective economic conscience that challenges Wall Street, which is hardly the gold standard in the category of caring about global economic inequality.