![the war wages on the war wages on](https://images.theposterdb.com/prod/public/images/posters/optimized/collections/123444/jK2210FZhJU6e9O4xcg6l7oiwqZjtknswg9QHUhU.jpg)
Instead it reflects China (no longer a poor country) managing a low death rate and decent economic growth – leaving poorer countries behind. When you weight by population, income inequality between countries has increased, but this isn’t about the West doing well. This means that if we compare country by country, income inequality has actually decreased. While we might have expected poorer countries to fare worse during the pandemic, richer countries have experienced more deaths and larger falls in income (health vs wealth trade-off misses the entire point). But what about economic global inequality? Economist Angus Deaton (currently leading the IFS’s Deaton Review of Inequalities) recently published his answer. Great leveller? The ‘catastrophic moral failure’ of very uneven vaccine access means we have a new global health inequality. So, have a good weekend steepening your learning curves with the reads below. And you know what helps with learning, as I tell my kids daily during home schooling (or parental failing as it’s more accurately known)? Reading, which is what TOTCs is all about. Central to this happening is Downing Street finding that crucial device, a learning curve. The key is that we now carefully release restrictions and only gradually phase out economic support, as vaccines enlarge the budget for social interactions we can afford without R rising above 1. But better times lie ahead with vaccination and infection rates respectively rising and falling faster than many expected. Here the currently peaking daily death rates are a sobering reminder of our failure to lockdown pre-Christmas. Nature is healing, albeit after the political equivalent of a nuclear winter. Sign up for our weekly Top of the Charts reading emailĭonald Trump is back on the golf course, the US is signing up to Paris, and the QAnon loons have realised something is up.