Its nice to see stuff like this coming to the forefront of public knowledge. We like to think that things are fine, but even in the land of "freedom" and "equality", they really aren't. This, coupled with the NSA spying scandals, means that this next year is going to be strange.EDIT:
My avatar is all "Wat is going on o_O"
My avatar is all "Wat is going on o_O"
My avatar is apathetic to his plight.
@Toast - the way I interpret this, what you just said versus the point that Poly makes, is that they are two views that are by no means mutually incompatible - they both can and do occur because neither is dependent nor exclusive from the other. By one measure, things are getting better, and by another worse. We can be raising the baseline poverty level, because that is based on an absolute number, all the same time while the income disparity also grows, because it is relative. This was a point that I was trying to make earlier, in that wealth disparity itself is not actually negative - it merely acts as a modifier to world income. It is when the disparity is too high compared to the income that problems actually occur. As the global economy progresses and drives the standard of living up, or society is able to sustain a higher wealth disparity while still retaining a net benefit.
A civilization with a hundred-times-current wealth disparity would still, in an absolute sense, be better off than our current civilization so long as it has a matching or higher growth in base income. However, this is definitely not to say that we can ignore wealth disparity - far from it, it is simply the contrapositive of the statement that a civilization with absolutely no wealth disparity is still shit if it has North Korea levels of income. I merely think we should work to solve both issues, and to be aware that they indeed are two separate albeit interlinked issues.I'm not disagreeing, I'm just rephrasing what the rest of you are saying. I'm just describing it as I see it and I don't see things getting worse in absolute terms, just relatively worse (disparity, conscience raising, etc), and that disparity is the problem that we can most directly solve by redistributing wealth without punishing the middle classes like current governments do. I just wanted to point that out so that I can understand it better.
There was no disagreement, I was just expounding on what you said. I made it a bit more explicit by editing the first line :P
Basically, you made a very good point and I wanted to flesh out how it relates to the other stuff.I think we should stick the Christmas tree guy in the red bucket. He must have escaped when I opened it.
Amusingly, how people think wealth in this country is distributed is very similar to what Americans think. Of course, it's less wealth overall, but the ratios are very similar.Huh, I was already expecting South Africa to have the worst wealth inequality in the world.