Arithmetic of societal in-equality
The awareness and espousal of the tenets of equity within and across groups remain fascinating. Related matters have been charted over the years largely by official government outfits, educational and religious institutions, private entities, influential individuals, and civil society at large.
In-equality synonymises the biased, crude, unfair, unjust, and distorted distribution of resources and opportunities in society. It often means different things to different people in varied conceptual contexts, even though its basic compartments are distinctive enough. These characteristic features present a triangular network with apparently confusing overlapping contexts in the fields of economics, sociology, and spatial analytics.
Literary reminders
Modest thoughts about them prick sharply with stark reminders of the popular novella “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe (which entrenched societal in-equality between males and females), and George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” in which four-legged animals were categorised as “good” and others as “bad”.
Reality
The existence of in-equality depends on complex differentials. It could be a real cause of itself or the (probable) unintended consequence of the nature of other life ventures. Equality and in-equality do not necessarily oppose each other; the former could be imagined simply as the “zero point” on the infinite range of the latter.
In mathematics, in-equality depicts a non-equal comparison between numbers or other arithmetic expressions, to objectively compare their sizes on the number line. In epi-statistical parlance, it is a form of appreciable variation in study designs and data scrutiny.
The clarity of the phenomenon gets blurred in health research scenarios where putative risk factors under study are composited. Typical examples are the concepts of nutritional status (NS; a composite of food intake, proper digestion, and nutrient utilisation), and socio-economic status (SES; a composite of educational attainment, employment and income).
NB: Granted more significant factors beyond these variables (e.g., household dwelling, size, marital status, property ownership, etc.), a broader statistically parsimonious inclusion and integration of these other factors becomes an explorable justification.
This would ensure the reduction, if not the elimination, of any potential misclassification of variables like NS and SES and the associated drawbacks from their posable residual confounding effects in crucial epi-statistical research.
Pervasiveness
Several studies about in-equality have been executed and reported on by many outfits including UN’s World Inequality Report (2026), and University of Ghana’s Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER).
NB: Of special mention is the latest of the annual series on In-equality organised by the UG College of Humanities (UG-COH) on 19th June 2026 at the UG Cedi Conference Centre as part of the commemoration of Day of Science Reconnaissance in Africa. The take-home message from this gathering was that in-equality is not confined to income or wealth only but is afflictive of every domain of economic and social life.
Key reported issues relate closely to generic asymmetries in wealth distribution, gender disparities, un-equal access to capital, and governance bottlenecks.
NB: Data suggest that the top 10 per cent of the global population’s income-earners earn more than the remaining 90 per cent, while the poorest half gets less than 10 per cent of the total global income. Wealth is even more skewed, with the top 10 percent owning three-quarters of it globally, compared to only two per cent for the bottom half.
Attribution
Both intra- and inter-national in-equities exert inter-generational alteration in life chances to effectually establish potentially diffusive league-like hierarchies of wealth apparently bereft of fairness and societal cohesion.
NB: The climate crisis – where only three per cent of carbon emissions are associated with private capital ownership while the top 10 per cent accounts for 77 per cent – is another stanza of in-equality.
Gender
Women reportedly work more but earn less than their male counterparts per unit time. One report suggests that they are engaged in work for, on average, 53 hours compared to 43 for men, having adjusted for domestic and care-related assignments.
Regional distortions
There is clear evidence of skewness in fortunes across the regional income-tiers of the world; high-income, middle-income, and low-income. Similar patterns exist within national borders as well.
In-equality is most pronounced in the food, nutrition, education, healthcare, politics, and income-related sectors of national and global economic setups.
NB: The relevant data pointers in all these scenarios are skewed (i.e., not “normal”) in their distributions, with only about one-third of the population having access to, and enjoying, adequate income and resources to acquire property, patronise recreational facilities, influence public policy direction(s), and have the best nutritious food available, for example.
Consequences
Scientific evidence abounds to signify the notorious adverse influence of in-equality on human health, comradeship, quality of life, happiness, and longevity. These vary enormously across societies, though, with the advantage tilted more towards wealthy individuals, powerful political actors and brokers, and affluent societies both within and across geo-political enclaves.
Remedy?
It may appear that because everyone is different, achieving equality is impossible. The phenomenon of in-equality per se, is not natural. It is also not an in-evitable handicapping condition. Therefrom, it can (and must) be curbed.
Certain positive measures can be applied to ameliorate its societal defects and damning dents, coupled with their concomitant ludicrous legacies of bigotry, discrimination, and stigmatisation.
Some countries, including Ghana, have embarked on keen initiatives to this effect via social protection and poverty reduction schemes and programmes of action to mitigate the social implications of well-intended economic adjustment frameworks.
Policies on realistic income fixtures, progressive taxation (with “a human face”), sound labor relationship (with fruitful investment in human resources), are commendable optional notions.
NB: Very effective equalisers of in-equality are public investments in high-quality affordable education and universal healthcare (with special emphasis on vulnerable infants, young children, teenagers, pregnant-, lactating women, and the elderly). All these efforts must necessarily have nutrition as a core component since the human body (“from head to toe”) is undoubtedly made up of nutrients.
The ultimate objective must be to attenuate early-life disparities and foster life-long equitable opportunities for most, if not all, citizens.
BY DR (DR) W. B. OWUSU
The writer is a retired UG-, Queen’s, and Harvard-trained freelance writer on science and public health matters. Email: wbowusu2021@gmail.com
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