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"The disposition to admire, and almost to worship,
the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least,
to neglect persons of poor and mean condition
is the great and most universal cause of
the corruption of our moral sentiments."
Adam Smith (1723-1790)
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Inequality is divisive and socially corrosive. For centuries, many people recognised that truth intuitively, but now the data show it is truer than we ever imagined. The bigger the income gaps between rich and poor, the less cohesive the society: community life weakens, people trust each other less and violence increases.
In the lead article, Nick Shaxson, John Christensen and Nick Mathiason explain why studies of economic inequality have systematically underestimated the wealth and income enjoyed by the world's wealthiest people.
In the following articles, Danny Dorling examines how tax changes in recent decades have contributed to rising inequality in the United Kingdom; David Erdal explores how wealth distribution has nothing to do with markets: it is a result of the use of power; and Thomas Pikkety, Emmanuel Saex and Stefanie Stantcheva find that chief executive officers are consistently rewarded for good outcomes which are directly due to a good industry-wide climate, and hence are not achieved by hard work.
The Inequality edition is available for download
here
Let’s not forget that other excellent observation of Adam Smith’s, which I’ve posted here before, I think, and which is SO relevant to the current situation of predatory 1% capitalism:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. ” Book I, Chapter X, Part II, pg.152
The 1% (or is it the 0.014%?) have been in ever increasingly effective conspiracy against the rest of the world since neo-liberalism captured the castle, and set the economic narrative 30+ years ago. Time to re-capture the castle – to storm the neo-liberal Bastille!
Too true