Inequality Takes Center Stage

Abstract This chapter focuses on the late 1960s to early 1970s writings of key development economists, UN reports, World Bank publications, and intellectuals at UNESCO such as Malcolm Adiseshiah. It also features writings by intellectuals from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The mid-1960s marked a transition to a sense of grand failure and a crisis of development and aid, and to the observation that economic growth alone did not guarantee that conditions for the poorest would improve. The World Bank is a critical case for demonstrating how mainstream the concern with inequality had become. In reaction to the widening gap, development writers reiterated various calls for international redistribution, more radical ways of restructuring the world political economy, and a broad pallet of egalitarian development policies. Global economic inequality was a major research theme and a grave moral concern, prompting an increasingly loud siren call for international and national political intervention.