Inequality among black South Africans has increased since the end of apartheid, so that South Africa’s inequality story is now about class as much as it is about race. Third: people often don’t know where their family fits in South Africa’s income distribution, chiefly because people who are relatively better off often do not realise how much poorer most other South Africans are.
And that helps explain my fourth point, which is that the relationship between inequality and monetary policy does not work the way people usually think. Lower interest rates typically worsen inequality.