By: Pippa Green
Martin Wittenberg’s inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town included a rare departure by an economics professor — the use of an animated video to illustrate inequality in South Africa.
It was adapted from a 1971 book, Income Distribution, by the Dutch economist Jan Pen, who used a graphic way to illustrate income inequality in the UK: he described what a line of people marching past would look like if their heights reflected their income. It was a march of many dwarves and a few giants.
For South Africa, the parade was even more startling. Using figures for per-capita household income in 1993, at the end of apartheid, and then again two decades later, Wittenberg took a man of average height, 1.8m, and represented the population in relation to that.
Apart from being an economics professor at UCT, Wittenberg, who died last week after a battle with cancer, was a former director of Data First, founded by the late labour economist and author Francis Wilson.
A former leader of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands in the violent years of the 1980s, he was detained and restricted during the emergency. In the democratic era, he played a leading role in measuring South Africa’s widening inequality.
“Martin did excellent work on figuring out what is happening at the top end of the income distribution. Because the rich are less inclined to participate in surveys and might be more inclined to under-report their incomes, one needs to do tricky econometric work to try to get a full picture of the entire income distribution,” said Prof Ingrid Woolard, dean of the commerce faculty at Stellenbosch University and a member of the committee chaired by Judge Dennis Davis, which sat from 2013-2018 to examine the tax framework’s impact on inclusive growth.
Wittenberg ’s expertise in both econometrics and geography led him to help the Finance and Fiscal Commission in determining the “equitable – share” revenue -sharing formula.
“These calculations matter hugely in terms of ensuring that all local municipalities get their rightful slice of the pie, and Martin did world-class work that everyone could find credible and fair,” said Woolard.
Fastidious about numbers and facts, Wittenberg was married to the late science journalist Christina Scott, who was killed in a car accident in 2011.
The contrast between their professions amused the economist: “You think in headlines, I think in footnotes,” he once told her, recalled his sister, Reinhild Vogel.
Wittenberg ’s research into inequality was path-breaking.
In his South African version of Pen’s parade, he showed an image of himself (the “average” man) standing on a field in front of Table Mountain as a steady stream of people march past him. The parade — an hour long— is an extraordinary illustration of income inequality.
It takes one minute for 650,000 people, who have so little income they don’t even reach his shoelaces, to come past. By halfway — 30 minutes — they only reach his thighs and some 19-million have gone past. It takes 46 minutes — and 30-million people— for the marchers to reach “average” size and therefore average income.
Then, as slowly as it takes the dwarves to grow, as suddenly do giants rocket. In the last two minutes they are the height of a four-storey building and in the last minute a few giants as tall as Table Mountain flash past.
This was the parade based on 1993 data. In 2012, when Wittenberg did his calculations again, there was little change, except that the dwarves at the start are slightly bigger (due to social grants) and the giants, which now include more black people, are taller than Table Mountain.
Most South Africans — except the very poor — incorrectly cast themselves as “average” in terms of their income. But the reality is, Wittenberg said, that university professors and other professionals are actually in the top 3.5% of the income distribution. “Why do people get it so wrong?” he asked. Partly it is because of the spatial apartheid that still exists — suburban people don’t “see” those who live in townships, urban people don’t see those in rural areas, especially the old apartheid “homelands”.
And then there is the reality of unemployment. As Woolard’s research has found, some 60% of South Africans don’t earn any income at all.
Wittenberg spent much of his professional life either teaching students how to use statistics to shape policy or campaigning for more reliable figures. In a television interview in 2022, he pointed out the hurdles that Stats SA faced in compiling unemployment statistics, derived from household surveys that had to be telephonically conducted during the pandemic. One of the lesser-known casualties of former president Jacob Zuma’s promise of free tertiary education was that resources to Stats SA were cut back (another was the departure from the Treasury of its insightful budget office head, Michael Sachs).
Wittenberg was born in Bethel, Germany, in 1962 where his father, Gunther, was studying theology at the time. He was the oldest of four children.
His mother, Monica, was a midwife, and according to former UDF activist Kam Chetty, who spoke at Wittenberg’s memorial, a stalwart in standing up to the police in the turbulent 1980s in Pietermaritzburg.
The family returned to South Africa when Wittenberg was a year old. He matriculated in Pietermaritzburg where Gunther was head of the university’s theology department, and graduated from the university there before going to Wits University. He spent most of his life, recalled his university colleague Prof Nicoli Nattrass, “trying to understand the society he grew up in in order to change it”.
Wittenberg is survived by three children, Nozipho, Ben and Ali.
This article first appeared in the Sunday Times.