A RECENT BBC article about inequality in the United States and internationally posed an interesting question. How much economic inequality do we want in our society? Some would say the obvious answer is none, but there are also common arguments for some degree of inequality as it is said to promote private enterprise, especially earlier on in a nation’s development.

The article goes on to focus not just on income, but accumulated wealth as a fuller measure of inequality. It mentions that the top 0.01% of the population holds 22% of wealth in the United States, which is shocking to be sure. With a number that small though, we can probably guess who those people actually are. It would be fair to surmise that Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder and CEO), Bill Gates (Microsoft founder) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO and co-founder) were in that group as their companies have continued to grow incredibly quickly.

Late last year Bezos became the richest man in the world, as an example. These are not men who merely inherited their riches or became CEOs of already thriving businesses. They built their companies from scratch, adding billions of dollars of value to their economy in the process. Given that those companies are now some of the most profitable worldwide, it should be no surprise that they have such sizeable amounts of accumulated wealth.

With the coming oil economy and the expected increased capacities to grow local businesses, Guyanese must increasingly ask if we want to promote the growth of captains of industry or restrict it. Promoting such entrepreneurs should certainly help solve our unemployment problems — especially youth unemployment — if we develop a technology industry, but not all Guyanese have the training to find work in this way.

The last thing we would want in Guyana is to ignore the question of inequality and end up growing the gap between those with different levels of schooling and training. Again, arguments that are common in these debates are that inequality leads to crime or even protests and instability. This makes sense, as those unable to get jobs due to not having had enough quality schooling may grow frustrated and instead turn to taking resources from their better-off peers.

Last, remember that the question of inequality must pay respect to history. Societies that are almost perfectly equal — as some might argue communist countries are — often suffer from other ills far greater in consequences than inequality. Maintaining high levels of equality requires a very high degree of control over the population, which can lead to rights abuses. Someone once put it to me that very few Americans ever fled to communist countries, because they couldn’t stand all the inequality in the U.S.

And indeed, the Berlin wall has been said to have acted primarily as a way to stop massive migration out of relatively equal East Germany, and into unequal West Germany. Further, one might argue North Korea is more equal than South, yet I would hardly imagine the North receives many applications for citizenship. Thus, this is not to say inequality should not be a burning issue as Guyana’s economy grows, but rather that we should acknowledge historical context.

Perhaps what Guyana should aspire to is to be somewhat like Norway, which the KNOEMA atlas relates has a much lower level of inequality than most states, and which also possesses large oil reserves. Learning from them is something to which we should certainly be open, even though we must of course recognise that there are many fundamental differences between the two countries. Norwegian economic model or not, inequality will be an increasingly important topic for our country.