SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES IN THE WORLD Part 2
HOW COULD IT BE REMEDIED?
This isn’t an easy question for anyone, especially for an amateur like me to answer. But, I can easily say that it is very discouraging that despite overwhelming evidences that vaccines are very safe and very effective, just how hard it has been for every government of the world to have their citizens to get vaccinated and to put a face mask on, so that they can protect themselves and their fellow citizens and the whole world from this deadly coronavirus pandemic.
Then how on earth could anyone ever be able to change human behavior? Human behavior is a part of hereditary and human’s nature is that we are all created with different features. That inequality is a part of our nature. Nevertheless, let’s try to define social and economic inequalities and look at them a bit more closely:
Social inequality can be defined as the imbalance of shared opportunities - like education, valued goods, rewards and power positions between groups. These are created in any society, because of differences in race, ethnicity, wealth and education.
It is unfortunate that all societies in the world, today have social inequalities. Social inequality continuous to exist because of unequal distribution of wealth. The accumulation of wealth can change anyone’s social class/status, much more readily than all other factors.
Social status (class) of any person is also influenced and created by their parents’ social class, education, wealth and fame.
Economic inequality on the other hand, can be defined as unequal accumulation of wealth. For many different reasons, it is usually in the hands of very few companies and/or people. The very rich usually make sure that it stays that way. They try to prevent competition and sharing their wealth by whatever means possible.
At the present time, America has the most mega-rich companies and tech billionaires in the world. This makes America the richest and therefore the most powerful nation in the world. China is very close second. Yet, the percentage of poor, homeless and destitute people in America, as well as in the world is steadily increasing. Have you ever thought what homelessness means, how cruel it is? No place to relieve yourself, to wash, to sleep and have no money to eat.
Why this inhumanity? Why does the richest nations in the world do not want to share a part of their wealth to overcome poverty and take care of their poor? This is very difficult for me to understand.
A recent and very interesting essay appeared in the prestigious newspaper The New York Times and revealed the names of the most prominent tech billionaires in America and what do they try do with their wealth. I thought it would be very helpful if I share these information with my readers for better understanding the issue at hand:
Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX ~ net worth of $317 billion
Jeff Bezos of Amazon ~ net worth of $197 billion
Bill Gates of Microsoft ~ net worth of $135 billion
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook / META ~ net worth of $119 billion.
Even though some of these megarich people are generous philanthropist, they are mostly ego – centric and tightfisted with their money. They do not even want to pay their fair share of taxes. In reality, the capitalism with its worst aspects – subsidizing them, being lenient for their taxes, letting them privatize their gains and socialize their loses for the government to pay, made them even richer.
It is interesting to note that political ideologies of the past, like democracy, socialism, communism, autocracy no longer make any difference for capitalism to thrive, to create a vibrant economy or to make nations richer. Today, China with its communist dictatorship has become one of the richest and most powerful nation in the world.
Since mega – rich people accomplished everything in their life, their life became rather dull. They started envisioning and doing unusual things to make their life more exciting and challenging. Like Facebook is trying to make us live in a make-believe virtual world by creating Meta (from metaverse), instead of the troublesome real world. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos started exploring and trying to commercialize the outer space and may try to establish colonies on the other planets in the future.
So, what can be done to remedy these unfair and cruel social and economic inequality and social ills in the world? I am not a sociologist, but common sense tells me that if this is allowed to continue, more catastrophic and uncontrollable events will follow, which are already happening.
I believe we need a new, bold, transformative thinking, ideas and policies for 21th century. Old and outdated ideas like MAGA (Make America Great Again) which was proposed by our elder leadership, would only take us back to yesterday’s world. 20thcentury ideas will not solve 21st century world’s problems. It is time to approach the future, not with elder politicians who have passed their retirement age, but with talented younger people (like younger Angela Merkel), who are smart, well- educated, computer and digital world savvy, and believe in humanity, science and technology.
