A Financial Times Best Book of the Year A hardheaded book that confronts and outlines possible solutions to a seemingly intractable problem: that helping the poor often hurts the environment, and vice versa. Can we fight poverty and inequality while protecting the environment? The challenges are obvious. To rise out of poverty is to consume more resources, almost by definition. And many measures to combat pollution lead to job losses and higher prices that mainly hurt the poor. In Unsustainable Inequalities, economist Lucas Chancel confronts these difficulties head-on, arguing that the goals of social justice and a greener world can be compatible, but that progress requires substantial changes in public policy. Chancel begins by reviewing the problems. Human actions have put the natural world under unprecedented pressure. The poor are least to blame but suffer the most—forced to live with pollutants that the polluters themselves pay to avoid. But Chancel shows that policy pioneers worldwide are charting a way forward. Building on their success, governments and other large-scale organizations must start by doing much more simply to measure and map environmental inequalities. We need to break down the walls between traditional social policy and environmental protection—making sure, for example, that the poor benefit most from carbon taxes. And we need much better coordination between the center, where policies are set, and local authorities on the front lines of deprivation and contamination. A rare work that combines the quantitative skills of an economist with the argumentative rigor of a philosopher, Unsustainable Inequalities shows that there is still hope for solving even seemingly intractable social problems.

Produced by a team of world-leading economists, this is the benchmark account of recent and historical trends in inequality. World Inequality Report 2022 is the most authoritative and comprehensive account available of global trends in inequality. Researched, compiled, and written by a team of world-leading economists, the report builds on the pioneering edition of 2018 to provide policy makers and scholars everywhere up-to-date information about an ever broader range of countries and about forms of inequality that researchers have previously ignored or found hard to trace. Over the past decade, inequality has taken center stage in public debate as the wealthiest people in most parts of the world have seen their share of the economy soar relative to that of others. The resulting political and social pressures have posed harsh new challenges for governments and created a pressing demand for reliable data. The World Inequality Lab, housed at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, has answered this call by coordinating research into the latest trends in the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth on every continent. This new report not only extends the lab's international reach but provides crucial new information about the history of inequality, gender inequality, environmental inequalities, and trends in international tax reform and redistribution. World Inequality Report 2022 will be a key document for anyone concerned about one of the most imperative and contentious subjects in contemporary politics and economics.

Poverty, in its universality, seems immediately understandable and yet, as a global problem, its dissolution remains highly complex.To illustrate what it means to live at the poverty line, Stefen Chow and Huiyi Lin visited thirty-six cities on six continents, and examined poverty with regards to food. From the local markets, they bought vegetables, fruits, cereal products, proteins and snacks - the amount of food they could afford per day based on the respective poverty line definition set by each government. They photographed the resulting pile of food, placed on a page of a local newspaper they bought that day. Using visual typology and artistic research as their guiding principle, they carefully calibrated lighting and shooting distance to ensure uniformity and comparability. In this visual reader, Chow and Lin embark on an economic comparison between the thirty-six countries and territories making the problem of poverty visible and comprehensible. In addition to the examination of the poverty line and its meaning across the world, the duo selected nine foods available in most of the economies observed to illustrate the globalization of production and the variations in prices and consumption. The book is enriched by texts that shed light on issues around the poverty line as a global phenomenon: The authors relate to the challenges of our society and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development whose first of seventeen goals is to end poverty in all its forms.