Is Inequality Overhyped?
The bustling city of Mumbai has a 27 storied, 173-metre tall building called the Antila. The Antila is the residence of India's richest person and billionaire, Mr Mukesh Ambani. At the same time, Mumbai also hosts Asia's largest slum locality called Dharavi. It is one of the densely populated areas in the world.
What does the above fact indicate us? Has the above paragraph vividly captured the essence of inequality? Let us for a moment become Akira Kurosawa and apply the Rashomon effect to this. How will a person who has a "Pro-Growth" stance witness this? They see inequality as the unavoidable "side effect" and sometimes necessary for the prosperity and well being of a country. If we ask the opinion of a person who believes in wealth redistribution, he or she might scorn Ambanis' for being able to afford such a luxury, while people at Dharavi are not able to enjoy any of those.
Are both of them justified? Let us expand the broader arguments of both sides. The Pro-Growth and Pro-Capitalism camp argues that inequality is inevitable, even if all the people are created equal. People have different skills, intelligence and environment and thereby leading to differentiated results. They also argue that the redistribution of wealth by taxing the rich reduces their incentive to create more wealth. They prefer to bring more people out of poverty rather than focussing on inequality.
The Pro- Socialist camp calls for centralisation and redistribution of wealth. They argue that money from the rich can be used to build public institutions like hospitals and schools. (Capitalists also argue the same except that they demand a liberal tax policy). Some of the followers of this school call for the complete abolishment of billionaires.
We can see from both their arguments that truth lies somewhere in the middle. How seriously should we consider inequality? The writer intends to quote a novella called, "The Wages of Humanity" by Cixin Liu for answering the above question. The premise of this short story is as follows: An impending alien invasion looms on earth. An alien society of one billion population is expelled out of their planet because one person controlled 99% of the wealth of that society and had the inviolable right to property, enforced by "Machines". Most of the property belonged to that single person and they had no other way except to search for an alternate planet.
Now, this might seem outlandish to many. How can someone own 99% of the wealth? This figure won't be fantastical if we look at the recent Oxfam report called "The Inequality Virus". The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 per cent of the planet’s population. The 1,000 richest people on the planet recouped their COVID-19 losses within just nine months, but it could take more than a decade for the world’s poorest to recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic, reveals the report.
The richest 10% of the global population accounted for 52% of the carbon emissions added to the atmosphere between 1990 and 2015 – depleting by around a third the total amount of carbon that can be added if global heating is to be kept within the 1.5C° goal of the Paris Agreement. The richest 1% were responsible for 15% of emissions during this time – more than twice as much as the poorest half of humanity
We don't even have to conceive imaginary aliens to understand the impact of inequality. We could just look back into history to study how humans with unique abilities and natural advantages such as having a large prefrontal cortex, opposable thumbs, etc, made them the alpha species of our planet.
We live in an era where countries across the globe try to gain a first-mover advantage in any discipline of science and technology. For instance, China wants to be a technology leader in CRISPR (Genetics) and Super Computing. While this may sound optimistic for the scientific community, it opens a myriad of problems to ethicists and philosophers.
Let us get transported into the future for a moment. The world has attained a technological milestone, where you could design your babies. Inequality means that only the rich might be able to afford them. "Designing your babies" means not only determining what complexity should they have and what facial features should they have but also their intelligence, personality, ability to do math, learn science etc. The chasm between the rich and poor had got even wider. Again I appeal to the reader that these kind of technologies are no more fantastical. Technology means progress to humanity only when it is affordable to all. Apart from genetics, AI is also another technology, when selectively available to people, might only widen the inequality further.
Should Billionaires exist? As someone who supports "Responsible capitalism", the writer strongly advocates providing an enabling environment for entrepreneurs. There should be no visceral hatred for money makers. However in the present scenario, where money could buy you "anything", the writer is sceptical about the existence of billionaires. The despicable acts by the Koch brothers to promote their self-interest and billion-dollar industries makes us wonder if they had taken the general populace for granted. Billionaires have a disproportionate influence in policy-making which might turn a hard-earned democracy into a joke.
It is not unnatural to remember a quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm when we are discussing inequality. "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others". While it is unrealistic expecting eradication of inequality, debates and discussions must start to reduce its adversarial impact. In the process of narrowing down the inequality, we must not lose sanity. Capitalism might make the rich even richer. The false notion of socialism makes people equally poorer.
What does the above fact indicate us? Has the above paragraph vividly captured the essence of inequality? Let us for a moment become Akira Kurosawa and apply the Rashomon effect to this. How will a person who has a "Pro-Growth" stance witness this? They see inequality as the unavoidable "side effect" and sometimes necessary for the prosperity and well being of a country. If we ask the opinion of a person who believes in wealth redistribution, he or she might scorn Ambanis' for being able to afford such a luxury, while people at Dharavi are not able to enjoy any of those.
Are both of them justified? Let us expand the broader arguments of both sides. The Pro-Growth and Pro-Capitalism camp argues that inequality is inevitable, even if all the people are created equal. People have different skills, intelligence and environment and thereby leading to differentiated results. They also argue that the redistribution of wealth by taxing the rich reduces their incentive to create more wealth. They prefer to bring more people out of poverty rather than focussing on inequality.
The Pro- Socialist camp calls for centralisation and redistribution of wealth. They argue that money from the rich can be used to build public institutions like hospitals and schools. (Capitalists also argue the same except that they demand a liberal tax policy). Some of the followers of this school call for the complete abolishment of billionaires.
We can see from both their arguments that truth lies somewhere in the middle. How seriously should we consider inequality? The writer intends to quote a novella called, "The Wages of Humanity" by Cixin Liu for answering the above question. The premise of this short story is as follows: An impending alien invasion looms on earth. An alien society of one billion population is expelled out of their planet because one person controlled 99% of the wealth of that society and had the inviolable right to property, enforced by "Machines". Most of the property belonged to that single person and they had no other way except to search for an alternate planet.
Now, this might seem outlandish to many. How can someone own 99% of the wealth? This figure won't be fantastical if we look at the recent Oxfam report called "The Inequality Virus". The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 per cent of the planet’s population. The 1,000 richest people on the planet recouped their COVID-19 losses within just nine months, but it could take more than a decade for the world’s poorest to recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic, reveals the report.
The richest 10% of the global population accounted for 52% of the carbon emissions added to the atmosphere between 1990 and 2015 – depleting by around a third the total amount of carbon that can be added if global heating is to be kept within the 1.5C° goal of the Paris Agreement. The richest 1% were responsible for 15% of emissions during this time – more than twice as much as the poorest half of humanity
We don't even have to conceive imaginary aliens to understand the impact of inequality. We could just look back into history to study how humans with unique abilities and natural advantages such as having a large prefrontal cortex, opposable thumbs, etc, made them the alpha species of our planet.
We live in an era where countries across the globe try to gain a first-mover advantage in any discipline of science and technology. For instance, China wants to be a technology leader in CRISPR (Genetics) and Super Computing. While this may sound optimistic for the scientific community, it opens a myriad of problems to ethicists and philosophers.
Let us get transported into the future for a moment. The world has attained a technological milestone, where you could design your babies. Inequality means that only the rich might be able to afford them. "Designing your babies" means not only determining what complexity should they have and what facial features should they have but also their intelligence, personality, ability to do math, learn science etc. The chasm between the rich and poor had got even wider. Again I appeal to the reader that these kind of technologies are no more fantastical. Technology means progress to humanity only when it is affordable to all. Apart from genetics, AI is also another technology, when selectively available to people, might only widen the inequality further.
Should Billionaires exist? As someone who supports "Responsible capitalism", the writer strongly advocates providing an enabling environment for entrepreneurs. There should be no visceral hatred for money makers. However in the present scenario, where money could buy you "anything", the writer is sceptical about the existence of billionaires. The despicable acts by the Koch brothers to promote their self-interest and billion-dollar industries makes us wonder if they had taken the general populace for granted. Billionaires have a disproportionate influence in policy-making which might turn a hard-earned democracy into a joke.
It is not unnatural to remember a quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm when we are discussing inequality. "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others". While it is unrealistic expecting eradication of inequality, debates and discussions must start to reduce its adversarial impact. In the process of narrowing down the inequality, we must not lose sanity. Capitalism might make the rich even richer. The false notion of socialism makes people equally poorer.
Structured very well excellent attempt from the examination point isn't too skeptical about the existing system ? Just my opinion reading this doesn't give me any hope that inequality can be handled in my life time. If any few strong points for ray of hope about addressing inequality shows balanced approach of your writing... just my opinion but really a good read.
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