Global Policy Forum

By Kai Müller

(measured in what share of the nation's personal income accrues to the top 10% highest earners)

Associated essay:
It is clear from these figures from the World Bank and others by other bodies (such as one I have seen from the OECD which showed Finland as having the lowest and the US the highest income inequality in the OECD) that some countries have managed to take better care of their relatively poor than others (compare Europe to the Americas) - one might even speculate whether some democracies have done so little against inequality that they are a sham! Since some countries have been more responsible and less confrontational than others in going about making a positive impact, it seems important to discourage countries doing nothing about their poor so that they may receive the most relief organization dollars with a new system or awareness. It must also be pointed out that the urban-rural divide (and neccesary -, as opposed to voluntary expenses) within a country can greatly exaggerate the inequality.

In addition to vertical inequality, there is often said to also be horizontal inequality. There are no statistics available on the per capita income by religious affiliation in New York, for example. Of many minorities it is well known that they are less well of than the rest of their country (Chiappans, Gypsys, Scottish and Welsh, Aboriginals and the indigenous population of so many other countries). Other minorities however, though they call themselves oppressed, are actually wealthier. It is mainly because they do not wish to fund the development of the rest of the country - in some of these cases there is also some concrete evidence of mistreatment, examples: The Great Lakes Tutsi, Rhodesian Whites, German-American Jews, Indian Sikhs, Fijian Asians and Spanish Basques. It is unknown to the author for certain whether the Sri Lankan Tamils, non-Han Chinese, Slovak and Vojvodine Hungarians, Germanic Romanians and the citizens of Aceh, East Timor and Chechnya before the wars were wealthier or poorer than their surrounding areas. The main explanation of the inequality appears to be the selective passing down of skills, rather than genetic endowment (so much of a self-esteem question that it will not be studied)

While there are many statistics available on black, white and hispanic demographics in the United States, there are very few further breakdowns available (along lines either of religious affiliation or of more specific ethnicity). It is further almost suspicious how unavailable pie-charts are on what almost everybody is interested in: Who owns what share of Ford, GM, GE, ADM, CNN, NYTimes, Macy's, Pepsico, Texaco, Shell, Citibank, Nestle, ... [In turn, we would of course need to know who owns the holding firms that own these companies.] Since this information is so secretive, we cannot even estimate what share of the money I spend, say, on a coke can in Denmark goes back to the US, or how much of the world's media is owned by only three people.

When a person is wealthy, he is not therefore evil. One can never generalize like this in a truthful way. We can merely observe that those who have more money are more likely to be aware of tax loop-holes and (having more than enough) are more taxable. A simple confiscation of half the property of a country's 10 wealthiest people, for example, would work wonders in financing projects everybody else benefits from, particularly if the government does not auction off the shares, but keeps them and only uses the dividends. Another question is what if workers owned say 40% of their own factory and elected their common spokes-persons on the shareholders' board, but that is a different debate.

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