On October 10, 12 countries across the world stepped out to give a message to Bank that the World wanted to it to trash its rankings. The message reached over a million people on social media and was covered by news media online as well.

This is an excerpt from a discussion between Dr. Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics (LSE) and Alnoor Ladha of /The Rules that took place at the LSE in early 2014.

It’s about time we called out the great myth that mass poverty just is, as if it were a natural part of some universal moral order. Such thinking is both profoundly untrue and disastrously misleading.

“Free trade”. The term itself is a trap — a brilliant framing device that neatly neutralises opposition. If you take a stand against free trade you appear to be taking a stand against freedom itself, which is clearly not a tenable position. In fact, in recent decades the term “free...

The narrative that poverty rates are declining and that extreme poverty will soon be eradicated has a tremendous amount of institutional backing; it is supported by the world’s most powerful governments and promoted through the United Nations Millennium Campaign. But this narrative is misleading: poverty is not disappearing as quickly...

Last month the Associated Press reported that the income gap in the United States broke a new record in 2012, with the 1% grabbing a greater share of total household wealth than ever before in history. This news follows on the heels of the fact that the 1% not only...

Global Wealth Inequality - What you never knew you never knew