Geography and the global income inequality divide

A few months ago, I noted here from Catherine Rampbell's review of Branko Milanovic's The Haves and Have Nots

an astounding 60 percent of a person’s income is determined merely by where she was born (and an additional 20 percent is dictated by how rich her parents were)

As much as geographers hate any variation of the idea of geographic determinism, various factors, including border controls, do make it an irrefutable fact that income and wealth for most of us are determined by where we are born.

Joshua Keating offers another chart from Milanovic's book, looking at the gini coefficients (a reminder: smaller numbers mean less unequal distributions)

And this advice:

because "inequality is now determined more by where you live than the class you belong to." The best way to change your lot in life, it seems, is to move.

If only people had as much freedom to move as capital has, right! 

Of course, the other side of the argument is whether we need to focus on the growing inequality, or whether the growing prosperity deserves greater attention.  That calls for a serious debate, right?

For now, the lack of a freedom to move means that:

The typical person in the top 5 percent of the Indian population, for example, makes the same as or less than the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American population. That’s right: America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s richest — extravagant Mumbai mansions notwithstanding.

The ones who want tight controls over migration unnecessarily worry, out of heights of self-interest, a Camp of the Saints scenario, as if that dystopia is all that is possible when people are allowed the freedom to move.