There are two main factors that push societies and civilizations toward destruction. One is civilizations or societies pushing natural resources beyond what can sustain them, i.e., a lack of sustainability; the other is a growing gap between rich and poor, i.e., growing inequality (Diamond, 2005). Inequality is systemic, as are sustainability problems, and they are increasingly recognized as related issues. A key to understanding the worst impacts of climate change on the planet is to understand that the poor will be much more dramatically affected than the rich. This important point is made explicit by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which directly links the sustainability challenge to the problem of (growing) inequality in the world:
Climate change will amplify existing risks and create new risks for natural and human systems. Risks are unevenly distributed and are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development. (IPCC, 2014: 13)
INEQUALITY AS A SYSTEMIC ISSUE
Inequality continues to grow globally, and the problem increasingly has to do with the ways in which business and economic systems are structured. A 2016 report by Oxfam puts it unequivocally:
“The gap between rich and poor is reaching new extremes. The richest 1% now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined. Power and privilege [are] being used to influence the economic system to increase the gap between the richest and the rest” (Oxfam, 2016: 1).
The U.S. now has greater inequality than about 70% of the world’s other countries, with gaps
between rich and poor rising since about the 1970s. Indeed, close to three quarters of wealth in the
U.S. is owned by the wealthiest 10% of the population, with some 35% owned by the top 1%, and a startling 22% of total wealth by the 0.1%. However, the problem is not confined to the United States. A report by the Pew Research Center notes that although some 700 million people around the globe have “stepped out” of poverty, they have only done so “barely,” meaning that they may no longer be living in “extreme” poverty but are still poor (Kochar, 2015). The same report also finds that while the middle-income population has increased worldwide, most people have remained poor, with 15% of the world’s population living on less than $2.00 a day and 56% at the “low income” level of between $2.01 and $10.00 a day. Moreover, the pathbreaking work of Thomas
 
Piketty warns of the possibility that structural conditions in the economy will continue to fuel ever- greater wealth gains by the already wealthy at the expense of the rest of the population (Piketty, 2014).


Global Jobs Crisis
These data suggest that inequality, both in the U.S. and globally, is in many ways as problematic as climate change. Both are potential sources of societal and civilizational instability—inequality can lead to civil unrest, particularly if there are not enough jobs to support people. A 2014 report by the World Bank warned that the world is possibly heading for a global jobs crisis: some 600 million jobs need to be created simply to keep up with population growth in the G20 alone, where there are already more than 100 million people unemployed and nearly 450 million living on less than
$2/day. An International Labour Organization report from 2015 indicated that the global employment situation is likely to worsen between 2015 and 2020. Some 201 million people were unemployed in 2014, more than 31 million more than before the GFC. Furthermore, some 61 million jobs have been lost since the crisis, meaning that nearly 280 million new jobs need to be developed by 2019 simply to close the gap created by the GFC. The situation is particularly problematic for young people, as almost 74 million young people (15–24) were seeking work in 2014. In addition, seemingly inexorable forces are shaping business and economics today, including global economic integration and technological changes that are shifting the number, type, and nature of jobs in both the developed and developing world (Rifkin, 2014; Pinney, 2014). Even what we think of as high- skilled jobs, like much of the work of junior lawyers, accountants, technologists, and some doctors, can now be outsourced or off-shored, with the resulting reduction of positions creating disruptions in numerous local economies (although others might benefit to some extent).
Inequality combined with lack of productive work for so many could even result in social collapse, as Jared Diamond (2005) dramatically argues. Protests like the Arab Spring, Occupy, and in Spain, Egypt, and Greece, among others, suggest the discontent that can erupt—and spill into civil disruption—if equity and employment are not dealt with effectively at the policy level. Even if collapse does not happen, keen observers like Piketty (2014) and Saez & Zucman (2014) warn of a “dystopian future” in which the rich/poor gap continues to widen. A vast majority of people, the bottom 90%, own very little, and can potentially experience quite readily a significant lack of dignity* in the way that they are treated and positioned in their societies.