Inequality

All societies are unequal, but some are more unequal than others.

Notes on What is living and what is dead in Social Democracy
from the New York Times. Aside: What are we going to do when NYT is no longer able to inhabit its obsolete position in our culture?

In the US today, the “Gini coefficient”—a measure of the distance separating rich and poor—is comparable to that of China.¹ When we consider that China is a developing country where huge gaps will inevitably open up between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the fact that here in the US we have a similar inequality coefficient says much about how far we have fallen behind our earlier aspirations.

As if that economic earthquake weren’t enough to engender despair, consider the American Idol (Britain’s Got Talent?) culture

This “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.” Those are not my words. They were written by Adam Smith, who regarded the likelihood that we would come to admire wealth and despise poverty, admire success and scorn failure, as the greatest risk facing us in the commercial society whose advent he predicted. It is now upon us.

Jim Huffman once said that in urban traffic he would yield space for in-coming cars – only if their car were as crappy as that driven by our friend Jim.

Once the author got to privitization – not even halfway through – my eyes started to glaze over so I stopped reading. I mean, come on, how many times does the problem need to be re-stated?

¹ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient