Not only are we now faced with slower growth, but that lesser growth rate is much more narrowly distributed.
Nurses, philosophers, and UK trade unions have, over the past 12 months, all shared some fascinating ideas on how we can make our societies more equal — and much better — places to live.
Dean Baker refutes Bill Keller's New York Times article, "Inequality for Dummies," published on December 22, (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/opinion/inequality-for-dummies.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0) in which he contrasts the "left-left against the "center-left.
Inequality across much of Europe has widened, but it is still quite modest when compared with the vast income gap in the United States.The question is whether relative equity can hold as workplace institutions that for decades protected European employees’ standard of living give way to a more lightly regulated, American-style approach, where the government hardly interferes in the job market and organized labor has little say.
The word “inequality” makes conservatives uncomfortable, as if it invokes class struggle, the 99 percent versus the 1. They much prefer “mobility,” which connotes a purely aspirational relationship to wealth and the wealthy.
Condemning the “new tyranny” of unfettered capitalism and the “idolatry of money,” Pope Francis argues in a newly circulated apostolic exhortation that “as long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.”
Spread the word