May 12, 2022 • 35 mins
This season on the Pay Check, we're going to seven different countries to see how a global pandemic shifted the balance between the richest and the poorest people -- and affected everyone in between. In this first episode, Host Rebecca Greenfield and reporter Ben Steverman discuss how the effects of the pandemic on our health, wealth, safety and livelihood varied widely based on where in the world we were. Then Brazil-based reporter Shannon Sims takes us to the country's capital, Brasilia -- One of the places with the sharpest inequality in the world. Through a day in the life of a single mother who added rideshare driver to her list of side jobs during the pandemic, she explores the ways the pandemic snapped the already fragile safety nets women in this vulnerable group had strung together to stay afloat.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is a podcast about money and inequality, but I've
been thinking about earthquakes a lot lately. I found these
videos on YouTube. The footage is grainy. It's usually coming
from a surveillance camera or one of those spy camps
people used to keep an eye on their pets while
they're out. At first, nothing's happening. You see a nondescript
(00:33):
office or living room, sometimes inside of a store, and
then a dog jolts into the frame or jumps up
from somewhere you didn't notice he was lying. He starts sparking,
then darting around, seemingly away from whatever danger he senses,
but also maybe towards it. To the viewer. At first,
(00:57):
it's funny because it looks like he's trying to scare
the wind. But then a few seconds later, everything in
the room starts moving, televisions fall over, lamps, wobble, painting, swim.
But the dogs are reacting to our pea waves, the
earliest signs of an earthquake. Humans can't hear them. Sometimes
(01:21):
we feel them as a jolt, but they sound an
alarming signal to dogs and some other animals up to
a minute or two before the bigger waves come and
the damage begins. There's another thing I learned about earthquakes.
The fault lines, the cracks in the earth whose movement
caused the shaking. Each one has an upper limit to
(01:44):
its potency, determined by its length and depth. In other words,
the existing fractures are what determined how bad the event
will ultimately be. The pandemic, in so many ways, has
felt like an earthquake to me. It was an event
that we all felt, but not equally. There were existing
(02:06):
fault lines. Some economies had programs that people could depend
on when their jobs suddenly disappeared because of lockdowns. Others didn't.
Some health care systems were already dealing with doctor and
nurse shortages going into a pandemic that would sap the
last bit of their resources. Others didn't. And in some
(02:27):
countries workers had few protections like paid time off if
they caught the virus, others didn't. As soon as the
impact hit in early we knew where those fault lines
were and saw the damage immediately and death's, job losses
and so many other ways. And it's only now that
(02:48):
some of the dust from the initial hit has settled
that we're able to see what we're left with Jovis
claims coming in, I mean really jumping from the week
before pretty brutal. Three point to a million records. Six
(03:10):
point six million Americans filed for unemployment last week. Many
Brazilians lost their jobs during lockdowns. While prices for rent, food,
and gas are on the rise, engine working women were
the worst impacted by the pandemic. Well now to the
billionaire boom. According to Bloomberg's super yacht charters are up.
Over three hundred and a billionaire was created every twenty
(03:34):
six hours during this pandemic. No, I'm not waiting in
line for a COVID test with the public. The gross
in his time for a wealth tax in America. Welcome
to the paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. It's not often that
a crisis heads the entire world. The effects of war
(03:57):
and famine and natural disasters canry far and wide. COVID
was different because it happened everywhere. But over the last
two years we've seen how a million different variables, or
those fault lines, determined our health, safety, and economic security.
People with the fewest resources were more likely to die,
(04:19):
especially in the earliest waves, and then poorer countries had
less access to life saving vaccines. Then there were the
economic disparities. Millions of people are at risk of hunger
because of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Even in the US
and Europe, more and more individuals are relying on food
handouts just to get by. With unemployment levels sloring, international
(04:43):
organizations expect the income gap between the richest and the
poorest to get even wider. The fear early on in
the pandemic was that we'd come out of this crisis
worse off. It felt almost inevitable. But that's not exactly
how things played out over the last few years. In fact,
what happened varied widely depending on how governments and society
(05:05):
has stepped in to address the crisis and what kinds
of foundations they had. Going in over the next eight weeks,
we're going to seven different countries to see how this
world changing event shifted the balance between the very richest
and the very poorest and everyone in between. Even before
the pandemic, alarm bells had been going off about global inequality.
(05:27):
Places with greater relative equality are more stable, They provide
people with economic security and more mobility to better their lives,
and going into the pandemic. Some of the most equal
places in the world, like the US and European countries,
we're moving in the wrong direction. So when COVID rattled
the global economy, economists and policymakers were worried about what
(05:50):
might happen. So it happened. I decided to ask Ben
Steve Verman. He's a reporter at Bloomberg who covers wealth inequality,
spending his days deepen data and talking with experts and economists.
He's been keeping a close eye unwealth inequality during the pandemic.
(06:12):
Right before the pandemic hit. What direction was wealth inequality
headed in globally coming into the pandemic. There were several
trends that we were watching. There were a few positive trends.
There was a growth of the middle class in Asian countries,
especially China that overall reduced inequality worldwide. And then you
(06:33):
had the number of people living in extreme poverty had
actually fallen. So those were positive trends, but there was
some concern that they were running out of steam, and
we had these negative trends that we're making inequality worse.
In the developed countries like the United States, middle class
was not doing as well and then you also had
not just the top one percent. Really it's the top
(06:53):
point one percent or point one percent. The people the
very top were doing much better than every one else.
And really there was a lot of concern about the
amount of power and wealth that folks at the top had.
So we were wondering would those trends continue, And there
was a lot of pessimism that basically a recession would
come along and it would hurt the middle class and
(07:17):
the wealthy would benefit. Okay, so then March economy is
basically shut down entirely. It sounds like economists and politicians
and policymakers they would all think it's definitely gonna get worse.
There was a lot of pessimism at that early moment
in in the pandemic, and I ended up writing about
this and researching some of the history, and what I
(07:39):
found was that when you have these major disruptions, if
you look at past pandemics, for example, inequality doesn't always
get worse. Sometimes it gets better. Sometimes these disruptions either
they can destroy a lot of wealth at the top
and then allow people at the bottom to rise up.
Or it can change the labor market, it can change
(08:00):
the financial market in these really surprising ways. So I
didn't think at that moment we really knew what was
going to happen. We were really entering into an unpredictable situation.
So of those two potential scenarios, thanks getting worse or
something surprising happening, what ended up happening. We're only just
starting to get the data to answer that question. What
(08:22):
we do know from the last two years is that
the billionaires and the top one percent have done very
very well. The world's five richest people gained about one
point seven trillion dollars over a couple of years. If
you just look at Elon Musk, for example, there was
a moment after he became the richest man in the
world where he was worth more than three hundred billion dollars,
(08:44):
and there was a lot of chatter at the time
that he might have a chance to become a trillionaire.
At the same time, governments, at least in the United
States and the EU had more of a sense that
we need to spread the relief, and so people at
the bottom got a fair amount in terms of stimulus payments,
extra unemployment checks, and enhanced child text credit that was
(09:06):
introduced in the United States, and so if you actually
look at the bottom fifty percent or so, their wealth
has actually gone up quite a bit. It's basically doubled
in the last two years in terms of dollar amount,
and it's still a tiny share of total US wealth,
but their share has been growing. And we don't know
how long this is going to last as inflation comes
(09:26):
along here, inflation could actually just completely erase all these
games in the next few years. We'll see, But for now,
there's some signs that the poorest Americans sort of the
working class you could say, and the bottom fifty of
the country have done pretty well. Considering so that sounds
like a pretty US or maybe Western Europe focused story.
(09:47):
How did it play out in other countries that were
maybe starting from different places of an equality. Well, not
every place had the resources to give a big bail out.
Not everyone can afford to trillions and trillions of hours
of stimulus, So different countries made different policy choices and
that ended up influencing the economy and how those countries
(10:09):
went through the pandemic. Another issue there is COVID and
how how countries managed COVID and how much either lockdowns
or the virus itself disrupted their economy. Some were in
lockdown for really long periods of time, and both of
those things, the stimulus and managing the virus, ended up
having disparate impacts depending on where you lived. If you
(10:31):
look at Taiwan, which really managed the virus quite well,
its economy actually grew in unlike most of the world,
and it actually grew faster than Somehow, US economy of
course shrank in. But then if you look down at Peru,
which had pretty severe lockdowns and it was really impacted
(10:52):
by the virus, Peru's economy shrank more than eleven percent
in one of the biggest drops in GDP in the world.
If you look at it, it's really country by country. Again,
we're still getting the data. We don't know exactly where
this is all going to end up. But one area
I'm really interested in is South America and Latin America.
(11:13):
Why is Latin America so interesting too? Before the pandemic,
we had a situation where inequality was getting worse than
a lot of Western countries. One of the questions we
had was where is this all headed. If you look
at Latin America, these are middle income countries and they
have a level of an equality that is about the
same as Sub Saharan Africa, places that are much much poorer.
(11:37):
So you have a situation where in Brazil, for example,
you have almost half the wealth of the country is
owned by the top one percent. In the United States,
it's about a third. But the question was, are the
US and other rich countries on the way to that
same kind of level of inequality? Are we going to
(11:57):
also maybe have the same kind of extreme polity x
and extreme gaps in society they seem to go along
with high inequality. So it's basically a cautionary tale. Ben
(12:31):
mentioned Brazil. It's one of the most unequal countries in
one of the most unequal regions in the world. So
that's the first place we're going this season, specifically to Brazilia.
It's the capital and it also happens to be the
most unequal place in the country. My colleague Shannon Sims,
an editor at Bloomberg, lives there and is giving us
(12:53):
the view on the ground. Well, I first moved to
Brazil back in two thousand and twelve. When I got here,
it felt like a totally different country. There was a
sense at that time that the middle class called classes
was completely booming, So families were booking Disney World vacations,
and they were investing in real estate, they were opening
new businesses. In two thousand nine, the Economist magazine published
(13:16):
an iconic cover story that showed the famous Christ the
Redeemer statute taking off like a rocket, and the headline read,
Brazil takes off Latin America's success story. By two thousand fifteen,
things had already started moving in the other direction. Growth
was slowing down, the currency was hurting, and then the
pandemic hit, and it hit really hard. More than six
(13:40):
hundred and fifty thousand people here have died so far,
but the impact on the daily lives of braziliance has
also been really startling. There are lots of things I
could point to to show how bad things are, like
how the Hayal plunged in value almost overnight in March,
and how Brazilians have loaded up on debt that they
can't keep up with. The average credit card interest rate
(14:02):
here has hit almost three hundred and fifty. But there's
one big, big group of people who we don't often
hear about and who have had it particularly bad during
the pandemic, single moms. Ever since I moved to Brazil,
I've been struck by the number of single mothers here.
(14:23):
Current estimates suggest that there could be as many as
twenty million single moms in Brazil. That's close to the
entire population of Australia. The trend is only increasing. The
number of birth certificates registered without a father jumped by
about over the past year, which indicates the group is growing.
(14:45):
Before COVID, single mom has already had it tough with
trying to sort out childcare, taking unpaying fathers to court,
commuting to jobs they were lucky to have in a
tough market. They seem like they were barely hanging on
in a precarious position, almost like an underclass. COVID, it seemed,
would have only made their struggle harder and only widened
(15:08):
the distance between their reality and how they'd like their
lives to be. So to better understand just how these
women are managing in the wake of COVID, I followed
one woman, a thirty five year old mother of two
named Hanata, through her day, which starts before dawn at
five am. It's still dark when I pull up to
(15:29):
Hanata's house. She's opening the gate for me and immediately
starts blurting out how she's grappling with a dilemma already. Clusion. Today,
we got a problem. My kids will go to school
(15:50):
this morning. There's going to be a teachers strike, so
they won't go. Teachers are striking for better pay here
and some Umbaya, a working class satellite city on the
outskirts of Brazilia. So rather than drop her kids off
at school on the way to work like she normally would,
she's happy to set up Plan B. They'll stay at
home until they walk alone to their after school programs.
(16:12):
Fourteen year old Juan is learning trombone and nine year
old Hailani likes dance and Notaza rummages through their backpacks,
checking to make sure they have what they need for
the day. As they stir in their beds, she wishes
them a good morning. Oh. As she gets ready for work,
(16:33):
she makes sure to leave some dinner on the stove
as well. That's because she won't get back before nine
pm tonight, hopefully in time to pull up the covers
on her kids as they get in bed, but maybe not,
and not to course coffee from a brown thermis. As
she eyes the time on her phone, she's got to
be out the door when her alarm rings in about
(16:54):
five minutes. She works from seven thirty to five thirty
every day and a big glass government building in the
heart of Brazilia a forty five minute drive away. She's
called a colpea, a cup lady, and she serves little
sugary cups of coffee to government officials all day long.
The people in suits who drink her coffee are the
same officials making the kinds of decisions that can change
(17:17):
the lives of Hanata and other single moms overnight women
who are just trying to figure out how to get
by in the wake of the pandemic. Despite their numbers,
single mothers are also one of the segments of the
population that most often get left behind. The National Statistics
Agency here reports that sixty three percent of households led
by single moms are living below the poverty line. For
(17:41):
those living above the poverty line, like Hanata, the unforeseen
arrival of the pandemic and now it's economic fallout are
threatening to pull her under. To avoid that plummet, she's
had to pivot, and so she is piled on top
of her regular coffee lady job. A hodgepodge assortment of
side hustles, jobs that are what economists might call part
(18:01):
of the gig economy. As a pandemic has worn on,
she's added more and more, and so now there's hardly
a minute in her day when she's not workings. Fessile
me the SA could think only time to get out
(18:25):
the door. Hanata says COVID has turned her life upside down.
She said she's been backed into taking on these extra
jobs just to keep pace with the cost of living.
As she darts around the house, quickly packing up for
the day, she tells me how she's battling to keep
above the welfare line because she doesn't want her family's
finances left to the whims of government assistance. In just
(18:47):
the past year, consumer prices have risen more than ten
percent here, and the most recent inflation forecasts show that
trend's only going to get worse. Nowhere has been spared
by the economic impact of COVID, but in brazz Ill,
the shutdowns disruption to the supply chain was compounded by
extreme drought conditions that ruined crops last year, and that
(19:08):
was before Brusha's invasion of Ukraine made everything worse the result,
the price of a tomato doubled over a period of months,
along with so many other staples. The value of the
local currency started evaporating amid all the turmoil, and soon
and not that went from serving fresh salads to her
kids to not being able to afford anything beyond rice
(19:29):
and beans. Nya sena sini fister doesn't size, they say,
saints it since basic bacasco guys gazolin the basics. Today
you can't. It's six hundred seven hund the highs, the basics,
the most basic of the basics. So the cost of
(19:53):
living through Brazilians due to COVID, due to the war,
due to everything that's happening, the cost of living increased
a lot. Really you a lot? No. I mean, it's
not impossible to manage as a single mom, but it
is complicated. As we get into her car, I noticed
(20:14):
the gas gage shows that we have less than a
quarter tank. It seems a little low for us to
get all the way into the city. I don't know,
as Scotts. Now we're going to pick up Dona Halsa
and she's a warrior woman to you know, to make
(20:35):
a little extra cash. One of Hanata's side hustles is
driving a woman named Dona Josa for a flat feed.
Hanata met her when she ubered her home one night,
and as it would turn out, Donal Hols is a
single mom, herself a mask that a hole. It's been
(21:05):
years that I get up at four am. It's been
years I raised my kids and this ridom. Hanata, who
still has her eye on the time, instructs Dona Halsa
to put on her seatbelt as Halsa hands her thirty
hay eyes. Dona host is a small woman in her
sixties from the northern Brazilian state of It's one of
the poorest in the country and the kind of hot,
(21:26):
desperate place where they say only the strong survive. Dona
Holsa carries that battle faced spirit with her. I'm from
I got here in seventy five. When we got here,
we would roll up our sleeves and get to work.
She raised her children on her own, but as she
tells me, things are worse today than she's ever seen them.
(21:48):
Hosa works as a housekeeper and one of the richer
neighborhoods of Brazilia called where organic grocery stores and cocktail
bars and fancy playgrounds for the kids line the blocks.
She's worked for the same family for more than five years,
but since COVID began, they cut back her days from
five to two per week, so she used to make
(22:09):
seven hundred and fifty eyes per week. Now she's paid
three d And there's a big catch. They told her
they don't want her taking the bus because she'll have
too much exposure to the virus and can bring it
into their house. That way, if she wants to keep working,
she has to take an uber and she has to
(22:29):
pay for it. As a result, the cost of her
daily commute increased tenfold, and Haulsa is not happy about it.
Last last, she should be paying part of my fair
(22:50):
I think she had the obligation to pay, don't you think?
But no, I pay with the tiny bit that I learned.
Hanata and Paulsa dive into a heated conversation about how
COVID has underlined inequality here, I no sabe somewhere LETI
(23:24):
rich thing that COVID only comes from poor people. So
I'm not gonna let the cleaning woman come because she
could bring it to me. But they don't think about
the fact that the people who actually bring the virus
are those who travel around everywhere will take plane to
go to other countries. We'll just stay in our little world.
We just go downtown, back home, downtown, back home. We
don't leave the house. The fact that rich employers view
(23:46):
people like Hanata and Donna Haza as the source of
infection is especially going to Hanata because of how the
outbreak happened here. At the beginning of the pandemic, there
was a major super spreader event a luxury beach resort
called Frangozo. It put on display how the wealth He's
jet setting lifestyle was contributing to the outbreak. Meanwhile, Hanata
(24:10):
has never traveled outside of the city. In fact, she's
only able to travel as far as her gas tank
can take her. We pull up to the gas station
and Hanna to ask the attendant for thirty he eyes
worth the gas. I realized the thirty hey eyes Josa
gave her earlier is the exact amount Hanata needs to
(24:30):
get them into Brazilia this morning, and not just constantly
on the hunt for cheap fuel, which is getting harder
to find. Petro Bras, the state oil giant, increased prices
by nearly in mid March. Now Brazil has some of
the most expensive gas in the world, and since she
can only afford a little bit at a time, she
has developed this finely tuned sense of exactly how much
(24:53):
she'll need in the tank to get her to the
next destination before the cardpt have meals she has, but
COVID it has gotten worse. We could buy things then
(25:13):
that we can only buy now. Working double the hours
because the price of everything increased also jumps out America.
Just watch what happens when I go to the grocery store.
I can't even buy a killo off chicken compan It's complicated.
(25:40):
This is the reality for Brazilians, a choke hold. Every day.
Hanata drops Holsa off and heads to the government ministry.
Ten hours later, I meet her as she's getting out.
(26:08):
Why as she's walking to her car, I asked her
how her day went, But I noticed her mood has shifted.
When I left her at work, she was a chipper.
Now she seems like she's forcing a smile, and I
soon discover she's actually furious. One alone, just get out
(26:31):
of his front of the face. I'm going to send
an audio message and let's see if to answer me.
Because the son of the owner is ignoring me. He
is ignoring all of us. I've got to call quickly
because the office is about to close. She sits down
(26:52):
on the driver's seat and almost immediately starts sending a
firm but polite voice note to her former employer. The
company owes her seventy eyes. That is week's overdue for Hanata.
That's a month and a half pay missing from her
bank account. It's not the only problem she's dealing with.
She's also taking the father of one of her kids
(27:13):
to court for not paying child support, money she desperately needs.
And throughout the day she's had to be checking in
on her kids because they're home alone. But she doesn't
have time to worry about all that now, not when
she could be making money driving Uber her new pandemic job.
She's got four to six more hours of work ahead
of her. What did Let's go ahead and turn on
(27:41):
the app. Let's work and make some money. Hanata had
never considered driving an uber before until the pandemic made
it necessary. She needed a quick way to start making
money to keep up with a surge and costs of food.
A friend suggested buying a car and paying it off
by driving Uber, except now costs of increase even higher
(28:04):
than she imagined, So she's locked into having to drive
Uber as much as she possibly can, and so she
can barely hold her eyes open just to not fall
behind on her carpet at it. Sometimes I leave work
and say I'm not going to drive today because I
(28:25):
am not in the right head space. But then I
think I will have to drive around because I've got
this carnet and everything else to pay. She starts to
pull up to a gas station, but sees the price
and swerves back one of the road. Did she about
the second month geez for already increased the price of gas? Shoot,
I'm not going to fill up here. Riding around all
(28:48):
day made me realize she'd been holding her life together
by a thread, and then COVID came and took all
these tenuous situations and just stretched her to the breaking point.
Things were never ze for Hanata. And then COVID came
along and threatened to snap all of those fragile strings
that Hanata was tying together. Job market disruptions from shutdowns
(29:10):
and supply chain breakdowns that led to inflation. It all
meant that Hanata's options for work got smaller, even while
she had to work more and more to keep up
with prices. In the aftermath of the pandemic, Hanata is
facing down economic forces that are too much for even
a self described geheira or warrior woman, and not as
(29:31):
a hustler. But she's working to her max. And she's
just one woman, just one mom, in a place where
there are twenty million like her, each of them just
trying to sort out a way to get by in
this new, harsh, increasingly unequal world. It's starting to get
dark out and she's running low on gas as always.
(30:05):
Let me see how much it is here. Oh my god,
it's going up everywhere. Just because the government said they're
going to lower the price of gasoline. They say the
station increased the price of gasoline. There's really screwing us.
During Hanata's Uber shift, she drives from Asasul to Asanoichi,
(30:26):
from one nice neighborhood to another, bringing people home from
work to their families. She tells me how driving uber
gives her a unique window and to other people's lives.
She says she sees people Austin showing off every weekend.
Maybe says it's a trip on the yacht or drinks
(30:48):
or women or drugs. Meanwhile, a lot of people are
experiencing hunger. Inequality is on her mind that she goes
from one ride to the next. Stine vivan Pi Social East. No,
(31:08):
capitalist in equality is enormous. We don't live in a
socialist country. We live in a capitalist country where the
rich would always be on top and the lower class
will be at the bottom of the well. Her uber
rights also make her think about her own life in
limitations on the open back downing Elias, that's a suging
(31:29):
Ways school. Yesterday I went to pick up a young
person at one of those English language schools in the
South Zone, and I thought, Wow, my daughter is never
going to be able to attend a school like this
with the money I make. I looked it up. A
year of tuition at that school cost more than fourteen
tho US dollars per year, and not just total income
(31:50):
is less than half that. My fast we think, don't
The photoco was mostly if there are days when I'm
totally wiped out because I have three jobs and I
have my kids and run the household, and I can't disappoint.
(32:11):
She continues driving along the way. She passes the modern monuments,
the hulking shopping malls, the Congress Building, and the Presidential Palace.
If she's lucky, she drives across one of Brazilia's postcard
bridges at sunset. I was seeing something I like a
(32:37):
lot as well. It's when I passed by the side
of the lake. I always stopped to look at the
horizon over the water and thank God. No that. Oh,
(33:03):
she's arriving home at nine thirty pm tonight, But she
could work longer. If she does eleven more rides, she'd
get a hundred and twenty he eyes of incentive bay
about US dollars today, though she makes the tough choice
to forego that money so she can see her kids
before they go to sleep. Yeah, she gets home and
(33:23):
they have a family dinner, a late one. After she
sends them to wash up and get ready for bed,
she does the dishes and sets the alarm for five am.
The pandemics toll on Brazil and people like Hannada is
the worst case scenario, a widening divide between the rich
(33:45):
and everyone else, which has made daily life a struggle
for many people. But there's another issue. Something then and
I talked about the real question is is there sort
of a natural spot that inequality heads a capitalist society,
Like over time, do we naturally become more and more
unequal up to a certain level until something comes along
(34:08):
and stops it, or can we do things policy things
that will prevent inequality from getting to that point or
from or reverse it so that without having a revolution,
Like it would be nice if we could have a
more equal society without having the kind of disruption that
World War Two, for example, brought along, or or the
pandemics of the Middle Ages brought along. Next week on
(34:30):
the Paycheck, we had to be part of the world
where wealth and equality actually reversed. For one simple reason,
poor and low income people got a lot of no
strings attached cash. The first emotion I feel, I remember
it was like almost disbelief, like me I got, like
(34:51):
my name never gets Thanks for listening to The Paycheck.
If you like our show, please how to over to
Apple Podcasts or We're where you listen to rate, review
and subscribe. This episode was hosted by Me Rebecca Greenfield
and reported by Me, Shannon Sims, and Ben Steve Verman.
(35:11):
It was edited by Francesca Levi with help from Janet Paskin,
Rocksheeta Saluja and Me. We also had editing help from
Daniel Balby, Shelley Banjo, Kristin V. Brown, Nicole Flato, Gilda
to Carly, Elissa McDonald, and Kai Schultz. This episode was
produced by Gilda to Carly and sound engineered by Matt
kim Our. Original music is by Leo Sidrin. The voiceovers
(35:34):
you heard were by Camilla Fontana and Isadora Colombi. Special
thanks to Magnus Hendrickson, Mckinninda Keeper, Margaret Sutherland, Stacy Wong,
and Aisha Diallo. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
See you next week.
This is a podcast about money and inequality, but I've
been thinking about earthquakes a lot lately. I found these
videos on YouTube. The footage is grainy. It's usually coming
from a surveillance camera or one of those spy camps
people used to keep an eye on their pets while
they're out. At first, nothing's happening. You see a nondescript
(00:33):
office or living room, sometimes inside of a store, and
then a dog jolts into the frame or jumps up
from somewhere you didn't notice he was lying. He starts sparking,
then darting around, seemingly away from whatever danger he senses,
but also maybe towards it. To the viewer. At first,
(00:57):
it's funny because it looks like he's trying to scare
the wind. But then a few seconds later, everything in
the room starts moving, televisions fall over, lamps, wobble, painting, swim.
But the dogs are reacting to our pea waves, the
earliest signs of an earthquake. Humans can't hear them. Sometimes
(01:21):
we feel them as a jolt, but they sound an
alarming signal to dogs and some other animals up to
a minute or two before the bigger waves come and
the damage begins. There's another thing I learned about earthquakes.
The fault lines, the cracks in the earth whose movement
caused the shaking. Each one has an upper limit to
(01:44):
its potency, determined by its length and depth. In other words,
the existing fractures are what determined how bad the event
will ultimately be. The pandemic, in so many ways, has
felt like an earthquake to me. It was an event
that we all felt, but not equally. There were existing
(02:06):
fault lines. Some economies had programs that people could depend
on when their jobs suddenly disappeared because of lockdowns. Others didn't.
Some health care systems were already dealing with doctor and
nurse shortages going into a pandemic that would sap the
last bit of their resources. Others didn't. And in some
(02:27):
countries workers had few protections like paid time off if
they caught the virus, others didn't. As soon as the
impact hit in early we knew where those fault lines
were and saw the damage immediately and death's, job losses
and so many other ways. And it's only now that
(02:48):
some of the dust from the initial hit has settled
that we're able to see what we're left with Jovis
claims coming in, I mean really jumping from the week
before pretty brutal. Three point to a million records. Six
(03:10):
point six million Americans filed for unemployment last week. Many
Brazilians lost their jobs during lockdowns. While prices for rent, food,
and gas are on the rise, engine working women were
the worst impacted by the pandemic. Well now to the
billionaire boom. According to Bloomberg's super yacht charters are up.
Over three hundred and a billionaire was created every twenty
(03:34):
six hours during this pandemic. No, I'm not waiting in
line for a COVID test with the public. The gross
in his time for a wealth tax in America. Welcome
to the paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. It's not often that
a crisis heads the entire world. The effects of war
(03:57):
and famine and natural disasters canry far and wide. COVID
was different because it happened everywhere. But over the last
two years we've seen how a million different variables, or
those fault lines, determined our health, safety, and economic security.
People with the fewest resources were more likely to die,
(04:19):
especially in the earliest waves, and then poorer countries had
less access to life saving vaccines. Then there were the
economic disparities. Millions of people are at risk of hunger
because of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Even in the US
and Europe, more and more individuals are relying on food
handouts just to get by. With unemployment levels sloring, international
(04:43):
organizations expect the income gap between the richest and the
poorest to get even wider. The fear early on in
the pandemic was that we'd come out of this crisis
worse off. It felt almost inevitable. But that's not exactly
how things played out over the last few years. In fact,
what happened varied widely depending on how governments and society
(05:05):
has stepped in to address the crisis and what kinds
of foundations they had. Going in over the next eight weeks,
we're going to seven different countries to see how this
world changing event shifted the balance between the very richest
and the very poorest and everyone in between. Even before
the pandemic, alarm bells had been going off about global inequality.
(05:27):
Places with greater relative equality are more stable, They provide
people with economic security and more mobility to better their lives,
and going into the pandemic. Some of the most equal
places in the world, like the US and European countries,
we're moving in the wrong direction. So when COVID rattled
the global economy, economists and policymakers were worried about what
(05:50):
might happen. So it happened. I decided to ask Ben
Steve Verman. He's a reporter at Bloomberg who covers wealth inequality,
spending his days deepen data and talking with experts and economists.
He's been keeping a close eye unwealth inequality during the pandemic.
(06:12):
Right before the pandemic hit. What direction was wealth inequality
headed in globally coming into the pandemic. There were several
trends that we were watching. There were a few positive trends.
There was a growth of the middle class in Asian countries,
especially China that overall reduced inequality worldwide. And then you
(06:33):
had the number of people living in extreme poverty had
actually fallen. So those were positive trends, but there was
some concern that they were running out of steam, and
we had these negative trends that we're making inequality worse.
In the developed countries like the United States, middle class
was not doing as well and then you also had
not just the top one percent. Really it's the top
(06:53):
point one percent or point one percent. The people the
very top were doing much better than every one else.
And really there was a lot of concern about the
amount of power and wealth that folks at the top had.
So we were wondering would those trends continue, And there
was a lot of pessimism that basically a recession would
come along and it would hurt the middle class and
(07:17):
the wealthy would benefit. Okay, so then March economy is
basically shut down entirely. It sounds like economists and politicians
and policymakers they would all think it's definitely gonna get worse.
There was a lot of pessimism at that early moment
in in the pandemic, and I ended up writing about
this and researching some of the history, and what I
(07:39):
found was that when you have these major disruptions, if
you look at past pandemics, for example, inequality doesn't always
get worse. Sometimes it gets better. Sometimes these disruptions either
they can destroy a lot of wealth at the top
and then allow people at the bottom to rise up.
Or it can change the labor market, it can change
(08:00):
the financial market in these really surprising ways. So I
didn't think at that moment we really knew what was
going to happen. We were really entering into an unpredictable situation.
So of those two potential scenarios, thanks getting worse or
something surprising happening, what ended up happening. We're only just
starting to get the data to answer that question. What
(08:22):
we do know from the last two years is that
the billionaires and the top one percent have done very
very well. The world's five richest people gained about one
point seven trillion dollars over a couple of years. If
you just look at Elon Musk, for example, there was
a moment after he became the richest man in the
world where he was worth more than three hundred billion dollars,
(08:44):
and there was a lot of chatter at the time
that he might have a chance to become a trillionaire.
At the same time, governments, at least in the United
States and the EU had more of a sense that
we need to spread the relief, and so people at
the bottom got a fair amount in terms of stimulus payments,
extra unemployment checks, and enhanced child text credit that was
(09:06):
introduced in the United States, and so if you actually
look at the bottom fifty percent or so, their wealth
has actually gone up quite a bit. It's basically doubled
in the last two years in terms of dollar amount,
and it's still a tiny share of total US wealth,
but their share has been growing. And we don't know
how long this is going to last as inflation comes
(09:26):
along here, inflation could actually just completely erase all these
games in the next few years. We'll see, But for now,
there's some signs that the poorest Americans sort of the
working class you could say, and the bottom fifty of
the country have done pretty well. Considering so that sounds
like a pretty US or maybe Western Europe focused story.
(09:47):
How did it play out in other countries that were
maybe starting from different places of an equality. Well, not
every place had the resources to give a big bail out.
Not everyone can afford to trillions and trillions of hours
of stimulus, So different countries made different policy choices and
that ended up influencing the economy and how those countries
(10:09):
went through the pandemic. Another issue there is COVID and
how how countries managed COVID and how much either lockdowns
or the virus itself disrupted their economy. Some were in
lockdown for really long periods of time, and both of
those things, the stimulus and managing the virus, ended up
having disparate impacts depending on where you lived. If you
(10:31):
look at Taiwan, which really managed the virus quite well,
its economy actually grew in unlike most of the world,
and it actually grew faster than Somehow, US economy of
course shrank in. But then if you look down at Peru,
which had pretty severe lockdowns and it was really impacted
(10:52):
by the virus, Peru's economy shrank more than eleven percent
in one of the biggest drops in GDP in the world.
If you look at it, it's really country by country. Again,
we're still getting the data. We don't know exactly where
this is all going to end up. But one area
I'm really interested in is South America and Latin America.
(11:13):
Why is Latin America so interesting too? Before the pandemic,
we had a situation where inequality was getting worse than
a lot of Western countries. One of the questions we
had was where is this all headed. If you look
at Latin America, these are middle income countries and they
have a level of an equality that is about the
same as Sub Saharan Africa, places that are much much poorer.
(11:37):
So you have a situation where in Brazil, for example,
you have almost half the wealth of the country is
owned by the top one percent. In the United States,
it's about a third. But the question was, are the
US and other rich countries on the way to that
same kind of level of inequality? Are we going to
(11:57):
also maybe have the same kind of extreme polity x
and extreme gaps in society they seem to go along
with high inequality. So it's basically a cautionary tale. Ben
(12:31):
mentioned Brazil. It's one of the most unequal countries in
one of the most unequal regions in the world. So
that's the first place we're going this season, specifically to Brazilia.
It's the capital and it also happens to be the
most unequal place in the country. My colleague Shannon Sims,
an editor at Bloomberg, lives there and is giving us
(12:53):
the view on the ground. Well, I first moved to
Brazil back in two thousand and twelve. When I got here,
it felt like a totally different country. There was a
sense at that time that the middle class called classes
was completely booming, So families were booking Disney World vacations,
and they were investing in real estate, they were opening
new businesses. In two thousand nine, the Economist magazine published
(13:16):
an iconic cover story that showed the famous Christ the
Redeemer statute taking off like a rocket, and the headline read,
Brazil takes off Latin America's success story. By two thousand fifteen,
things had already started moving in the other direction. Growth
was slowing down, the currency was hurting, and then the
pandemic hit, and it hit really hard. More than six
(13:40):
hundred and fifty thousand people here have died so far,
but the impact on the daily lives of braziliance has
also been really startling. There are lots of things I
could point to to show how bad things are, like
how the Hayal plunged in value almost overnight in March,
and how Brazilians have loaded up on debt that they
can't keep up with. The average credit card interest rate
(14:02):
here has hit almost three hundred and fifty. But there's
one big, big group of people who we don't often
hear about and who have had it particularly bad during
the pandemic, single moms. Ever since I moved to Brazil,
I've been struck by the number of single mothers here.
(14:23):
Current estimates suggest that there could be as many as
twenty million single moms in Brazil. That's close to the
entire population of Australia. The trend is only increasing. The
number of birth certificates registered without a father jumped by
about over the past year, which indicates the group is growing.
(14:45):
Before COVID, single mom has already had it tough with
trying to sort out childcare, taking unpaying fathers to court,
commuting to jobs they were lucky to have in a
tough market. They seem like they were barely hanging on
in a precarious position, almost like an underclass. COVID, it seemed,
would have only made their struggle harder and only widened
(15:08):
the distance between their reality and how they'd like their
lives to be. So to better understand just how these
women are managing in the wake of COVID, I followed
one woman, a thirty five year old mother of two
named Hanata, through her day, which starts before dawn at
five am. It's still dark when I pull up to
(15:29):
Hanata's house. She's opening the gate for me and immediately
starts blurting out how she's grappling with a dilemma already. Clusion. Today,
we got a problem. My kids will go to school
(15:50):
this morning. There's going to be a teachers strike, so
they won't go. Teachers are striking for better pay here
and some Umbaya, a working class satellite city on the
outskirts of Brazilia. So rather than drop her kids off
at school on the way to work like she normally would,
she's happy to set up Plan B. They'll stay at
home until they walk alone to their after school programs.
(16:12):
Fourteen year old Juan is learning trombone and nine year
old Hailani likes dance and Notaza rummages through their backpacks,
checking to make sure they have what they need for
the day. As they stir in their beds, she wishes
them a good morning. Oh. As she gets ready for work,
(16:33):
she makes sure to leave some dinner on the stove
as well. That's because she won't get back before nine
pm tonight, hopefully in time to pull up the covers
on her kids as they get in bed, but maybe not,
and not to course coffee from a brown thermis. As
she eyes the time on her phone, she's got to
be out the door when her alarm rings in about
(16:54):
five minutes. She works from seven thirty to five thirty
every day and a big glass government building in the
heart of Brazilia a forty five minute drive away. She's
called a colpea, a cup lady, and she serves little
sugary cups of coffee to government officials all day long.
The people in suits who drink her coffee are the
same officials making the kinds of decisions that can change
(17:17):
the lives of Hanata and other single moms overnight women
who are just trying to figure out how to get
by in the wake of the pandemic. Despite their numbers,
single mothers are also one of the segments of the
population that most often get left behind. The National Statistics
Agency here reports that sixty three percent of households led
by single moms are living below the poverty line. For
(17:41):
those living above the poverty line, like Hanata, the unforeseen
arrival of the pandemic and now it's economic fallout are
threatening to pull her under. To avoid that plummet, she's
had to pivot, and so she is piled on top
of her regular coffee lady job. A hodgepodge assortment of
side hustles, jobs that are what economists might call part
(18:01):
of the gig economy. As a pandemic has worn on,
she's added more and more, and so now there's hardly
a minute in her day when she's not workings. Fessile
me the SA could think only time to get out
(18:25):
the door. Hanata says COVID has turned her life upside down.
She said she's been backed into taking on these extra
jobs just to keep pace with the cost of living.
As she darts around the house, quickly packing up for
the day, she tells me how she's battling to keep
above the welfare line because she doesn't want her family's
finances left to the whims of government assistance. In just
(18:47):
the past year, consumer prices have risen more than ten
percent here, and the most recent inflation forecasts show that
trend's only going to get worse. Nowhere has been spared
by the economic impact of COVID, but in brazz Ill,
the shutdowns disruption to the supply chain was compounded by
extreme drought conditions that ruined crops last year, and that
(19:08):
was before Brusha's invasion of Ukraine made everything worse the result,
the price of a tomato doubled over a period of months,
along with so many other staples. The value of the
local currency started evaporating amid all the turmoil, and soon
and not that went from serving fresh salads to her
kids to not being able to afford anything beyond rice
(19:29):
and beans. Nya sena sini fister doesn't size, they say,
saints it since basic bacasco guys gazolin the basics. Today
you can't. It's six hundred seven hund the highs, the basics,
the most basic of the basics. So the cost of
(19:53):
living through Brazilians due to COVID, due to the war,
due to everything that's happening, the cost of living increased
a lot. Really you a lot? No. I mean, it's
not impossible to manage as a single mom, but it
is complicated. As we get into her car, I noticed
(20:14):
the gas gage shows that we have less than a
quarter tank. It seems a little low for us to
get all the way into the city. I don't know,
as Scotts. Now we're going to pick up Dona Halsa
and she's a warrior woman to you know, to make
(20:35):
a little extra cash. One of Hanata's side hustles is
driving a woman named Dona Josa for a flat feed.
Hanata met her when she ubered her home one night,
and as it would turn out, Donal Hols is a
single mom, herself a mask that a hole. It's been
(21:05):
years that I get up at four am. It's been
years I raised my kids and this ridom. Hanata, who
still has her eye on the time, instructs Dona Halsa
to put on her seatbelt as Halsa hands her thirty
hay eyes. Dona host is a small woman in her
sixties from the northern Brazilian state of It's one of
the poorest in the country and the kind of hot,
(21:26):
desperate place where they say only the strong survive. Dona
Holsa carries that battle faced spirit with her. I'm from
I got here in seventy five. When we got here,
we would roll up our sleeves and get to work.
She raised her children on her own, but as she
tells me, things are worse today than she's ever seen them.
(21:48):
Hosa works as a housekeeper and one of the richer
neighborhoods of Brazilia called where organic grocery stores and cocktail
bars and fancy playgrounds for the kids line the blocks.
She's worked for the same family for more than five years,
but since COVID began, they cut back her days from
five to two per week, so she used to make
(22:09):
seven hundred and fifty eyes per week. Now she's paid
three d And there's a big catch. They told her
they don't want her taking the bus because she'll have
too much exposure to the virus and can bring it
into their house. That way, if she wants to keep working,
she has to take an uber and she has to
(22:29):
pay for it. As a result, the cost of her
daily commute increased tenfold, and Haulsa is not happy about it.
Last last, she should be paying part of my fair
(22:50):
I think she had the obligation to pay, don't you think?
But no, I pay with the tiny bit that I learned.
Hanata and Paulsa dive into a heated conversation about how
COVID has underlined inequality here, I no sabe somewhere LETI
(23:24):
rich thing that COVID only comes from poor people. So
I'm not gonna let the cleaning woman come because she
could bring it to me. But they don't think about
the fact that the people who actually bring the virus
are those who travel around everywhere will take plane to
go to other countries. We'll just stay in our little world.
We just go downtown, back home, downtown, back home. We
don't leave the house. The fact that rich employers view
(23:46):
people like Hanata and Donna Haza as the source of
infection is especially going to Hanata because of how the
outbreak happened here. At the beginning of the pandemic, there
was a major super spreader event a luxury beach resort
called Frangozo. It put on display how the wealth He's
jet setting lifestyle was contributing to the outbreak. Meanwhile, Hanata
(24:10):
has never traveled outside of the city. In fact, she's
only able to travel as far as her gas tank
can take her. We pull up to the gas station
and Hanna to ask the attendant for thirty he eyes
worth the gas. I realized the thirty hey eyes Josa
gave her earlier is the exact amount Hanata needs to
(24:30):
get them into Brazilia this morning, and not just constantly
on the hunt for cheap fuel, which is getting harder
to find. Petro Bras, the state oil giant, increased prices
by nearly in mid March. Now Brazil has some of
the most expensive gas in the world, and since she
can only afford a little bit at a time, she
has developed this finely tuned sense of exactly how much
(24:53):
she'll need in the tank to get her to the
next destination before the cardpt have meals she has, but
COVID it has gotten worse. We could buy things then
(25:13):
that we can only buy now. Working double the hours
because the price of everything increased also jumps out America.
Just watch what happens when I go to the grocery store.
I can't even buy a killo off chicken compan It's complicated.
(25:40):
This is the reality for Brazilians, a choke hold. Every day.
Hanata drops Holsa off and heads to the government ministry.
Ten hours later, I meet her as she's getting out.
(26:08):
Why as she's walking to her car, I asked her
how her day went, But I noticed her mood has shifted.
When I left her at work, she was a chipper.
Now she seems like she's forcing a smile, and I
soon discover she's actually furious. One alone, just get out
(26:31):
of his front of the face. I'm going to send
an audio message and let's see if to answer me.
Because the son of the owner is ignoring me. He
is ignoring all of us. I've got to call quickly
because the office is about to close. She sits down
(26:52):
on the driver's seat and almost immediately starts sending a
firm but polite voice note to her former employer. The
company owes her seventy eyes. That is week's overdue for Hanata.
That's a month and a half pay missing from her
bank account. It's not the only problem she's dealing with.
She's also taking the father of one of her kids
(27:13):
to court for not paying child support, money she desperately needs.
And throughout the day she's had to be checking in
on her kids because they're home alone. But she doesn't
have time to worry about all that now, not when
she could be making money driving Uber her new pandemic job.
She's got four to six more hours of work ahead
of her. What did Let's go ahead and turn on
(27:41):
the app. Let's work and make some money. Hanata had
never considered driving an uber before until the pandemic made
it necessary. She needed a quick way to start making
money to keep up with a surge and costs of food.
A friend suggested buying a car and paying it off
by driving Uber, except now costs of increase even higher
(28:04):
than she imagined, So she's locked into having to drive
Uber as much as she possibly can, and so she
can barely hold her eyes open just to not fall
behind on her carpet at it. Sometimes I leave work
and say I'm not going to drive today because I
(28:25):
am not in the right head space. But then I
think I will have to drive around because I've got
this carnet and everything else to pay. She starts to
pull up to a gas station, but sees the price
and swerves back one of the road. Did she about
the second month geez for already increased the price of gas? Shoot,
I'm not going to fill up here. Riding around all
(28:48):
day made me realize she'd been holding her life together
by a thread, and then COVID came and took all
these tenuous situations and just stretched her to the breaking point.
Things were never ze for Hanata. And then COVID came
along and threatened to snap all of those fragile strings
that Hanata was tying together. Job market disruptions from shutdowns
(29:10):
and supply chain breakdowns that led to inflation. It all
meant that Hanata's options for work got smaller, even while
she had to work more and more to keep up
with prices. In the aftermath of the pandemic, Hanata is
facing down economic forces that are too much for even
a self described geheira or warrior woman, and not as
(29:31):
a hustler. But she's working to her max. And she's
just one woman, just one mom, in a place where
there are twenty million like her, each of them just
trying to sort out a way to get by in
this new, harsh, increasingly unequal world. It's starting to get
dark out and she's running low on gas as always.
(30:05):
Let me see how much it is here. Oh my god,
it's going up everywhere. Just because the government said they're
going to lower the price of gasoline. They say the
station increased the price of gasoline. There's really screwing us.
During Hanata's Uber shift, she drives from Asasul to Asanoichi,
(30:26):
from one nice neighborhood to another, bringing people home from
work to their families. She tells me how driving uber
gives her a unique window and to other people's lives.
She says she sees people Austin showing off every weekend.
Maybe says it's a trip on the yacht or drinks
(30:48):
or women or drugs. Meanwhile, a lot of people are
experiencing hunger. Inequality is on her mind that she goes
from one ride to the next. Stine vivan Pi Social East. No,
(31:08):
capitalist in equality is enormous. We don't live in a
socialist country. We live in a capitalist country where the
rich would always be on top and the lower class
will be at the bottom of the well. Her uber
rights also make her think about her own life in
limitations on the open back downing Elias, that's a suging
(31:29):
Ways school. Yesterday I went to pick up a young
person at one of those English language schools in the
South Zone, and I thought, Wow, my daughter is never
going to be able to attend a school like this
with the money I make. I looked it up. A
year of tuition at that school cost more than fourteen
tho US dollars per year, and not just total income
(31:50):
is less than half that. My fast we think, don't
The photoco was mostly if there are days when I'm
totally wiped out because I have three jobs and I
have my kids and run the household, and I can't disappoint.
(32:11):
She continues driving along the way. She passes the modern monuments,
the hulking shopping malls, the Congress Building, and the Presidential Palace.
If she's lucky, she drives across one of Brazilia's postcard
bridges at sunset. I was seeing something I like a
(32:37):
lot as well. It's when I passed by the side
of the lake. I always stopped to look at the
horizon over the water and thank God. No that. Oh,
(33:03):
she's arriving home at nine thirty pm tonight, But she
could work longer. If she does eleven more rides, she'd
get a hundred and twenty he eyes of incentive bay
about US dollars today, though she makes the tough choice
to forego that money so she can see her kids
before they go to sleep. Yeah, she gets home and
(33:23):
they have a family dinner, a late one. After she
sends them to wash up and get ready for bed,
she does the dishes and sets the alarm for five am.
The pandemics toll on Brazil and people like Hannada is
the worst case scenario, a widening divide between the rich
(33:45):
and everyone else, which has made daily life a struggle
for many people. But there's another issue. Something then and
I talked about the real question is is there sort
of a natural spot that inequality heads a capitalist society,
Like over time, do we naturally become more and more
unequal up to a certain level until something comes along
(34:08):
and stops it, or can we do things policy things
that will prevent inequality from getting to that point or
from or reverse it so that without having a revolution,
Like it would be nice if we could have a
more equal society without having the kind of disruption that
World War Two, for example, brought along, or or the
pandemics of the Middle Ages brought along. Next week on
(34:30):
the Paycheck, we had to be part of the world
where wealth and equality actually reversed. For one simple reason,
poor and low income people got a lot of no
strings attached cash. The first emotion I feel, I remember
it was like almost disbelief, like me I got, like
(34:51):
my name never gets Thanks for listening to The Paycheck.
If you like our show, please how to over to
Apple Podcasts or We're where you listen to rate, review
and subscribe. This episode was hosted by Me Rebecca Greenfield
and reported by Me, Shannon Sims, and Ben Steve Verman.
(35:11):
It was edited by Francesca Levi with help from Janet Paskin,
Rocksheeta Saluja and Me. We also had editing help from
Daniel Balby, Shelley Banjo, Kristin V. Brown, Nicole Flato, Gilda
to Carly, Elissa McDonald, and Kai Schultz. This episode was
produced by Gilda to Carly and sound engineered by Matt
kim Our. Original music is by Leo Sidrin. The voiceovers
(35:34):
you heard were by Camilla Fontana and Isadora Colombi. Special
thanks to Magnus Hendrickson, Mckinninda Keeper, Margaret Sutherland, Stacy Wong,
and Aisha Diallo. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
See you next week.
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