Does economic inequality necessarily imply poverty?

Does economic inequality necessarily imply poverty?

On several occasions, from famous politicians to certain public intellectuals, it has been affirmed, with some variations, that: 1% of a certain population has the same wealth as the bottom 50%. The fact that such a figure is considered a social problem by some individuals makes us erroneously ask the following: do human beings seek to be equal or unequal? Such a question, like their answers, are ambiguous since the type of equality to which they refer is not specified.

Through debates on these types of issues, conservatives and libertarians have presented an alternative to equality of results: equal opportunities. Not as a substitute concept, but as "our true aspiration" or ideal. However, this alternative, like the concept of political freedom as a set of positive and negative liberties, has led to the justification of various social rights through public services; since, following their line of thought, in the absence of such rights there can not be such a form of equality (of opportunities).

Economic inequality implies poverty?
If economic inequality is a social problem or not, it is the product of highly subjective criteria. However, if such social condition always produces poverty, we could take it as a synonym of it and forget everything previously presented. If we take the question that constitutes the title of this article only abstractly, it would be obvious to us that: if person A owns 200 sandwiches and person B only 5, both can be satisfied at the end of their lunch; the difference in the amount of goods that both possess does not imply that the second will go hungry during that meal. A similar result can be shown by means of the following empirical data: Thomas Piketty states in his book "Capital in the Twenty-first Century" that economic inequality has increased not only in European countries and the US, but also within emerging economies ( although he only points out 5 examples), however, as DW MacKenzie states in "The Data Is Clear: Free Markets Reduce Poverty":

Thirty years ago, half (50 percent) of the population of the poorest nations of the world lived in extreme poverty. In 2012, 21 percent of people in the poorest nations of the world live in extreme poverty. The development of global markets has greatly reduced poverty throughout the world.

If these two types of socio-economic phenomena are not differentiated, and thus delimit their causal relationships, we can fall erroneously into redistributive solutions for poverty such as the existence of progressive taxes on income, taxes on inheritance, universal basic income, among others. However, the concept of poverty has many problems, as noted by the American economist Thomas Sowell in the past, or as explained by Ryan McMaken in "The Poor in the US Are Richer than the Middle Class in Much of Europe":

Therefore, the fact that the United States has higher poverty rates says very little about the real standard of living of the poor. The poor have higher incomes in the United States in real terms in most cases. The countries that really should be concerned are the countries that have high levels of poverty and low average incomes.

Because of this, when talking about poverty it is necessary to be more specific and indicate changes around social variables such as: child malnutrition, illiteracy, tetanus, polio, among others. The state redistribution of wealth only partially and temporarily solves economic inequality. On the other hand, the markets that possess high degrees of economic freedom produce the conditions for the creation of wealth.