It's been that way since life became at the level of protists. And cities tended to draw people in to labor to feed them, and not even all the inhabitants of the urban environment benefited, perhaps, but their lot was still better than the slave who worked for the landowner.

Our political structures wrap our leaders in a great aura of mystique and tend to support themselves by tremendous bloodshed proportionate to each era. A truly equitable world with the global South able to determine its own destiny would be the economic ruin of the global North. Albeit it would also be a world with a Global South that isn't both extremely poor and extremely populated in that time bomb of a connection.

This is not a great or a grand world, it's mostly been a harsh and brutal one and only in the last century or so has that moderated to a great degree even in the Rich countries.