> It's remarkable how many people in the NYT comments dismiss this as a distraction from the more important issue of within-country inequality. I guess it's mor

> It's remarkable how many people in the NYT comments dismiss this as a distraction from the more important issue of within-country inequality. I guess it's more important to help out someone earning $15,000 a year who looks like us, than someone who earns $400 a year who doesn't. Global poverty is truly horrific, on a level that most people in the first world can't even comprehend, and its continued reduction is one of the really great (incomplete) triumphs of human history. I'm pretty familiar with the issue of global poverty, but the critics are right: the policies that reduce poverty and inequality at the national level are not mutually exclusive with those that reduce poverty at the global level. More importantly, nation states CAN reduce poverty/inequality within their own borders (and many policies that do so are simply good economic common sense [1]), while there's a limit to what any particular country can do on a global scale. In short, decreasing inequality at the global level is no excuse not to combat rising inequality at the national level. [1] Such as universal healthcare and accessible education.