Inequality In The 19th Century: Summary And Analysis

‘No one should be four times richer than the poorest member of the society’, expressed his view famous ancient philosopher Plato (cited in Atkinson, 2015, p 13). Probably, since the start of the Industrial Revolution, 19th century, economic inequality between people increased excessively. At present, surprisingly, the 62 richest billionaires’ wealth is equal to that of half of the poorer population of the world (Davos, 2016). It means that minority of the people are enjoying luxury life while the others are struggling even to find a piece of bread to survive in this unequal world. Now the gap between rich and poor is enlarging considerably; issues associated with inequality are getting worse constantly and the need to reform revealing

Plutocracy is ‘a system of government in which the richest people in a country rule or have power’ (Cambridge dictionary, 2016). Now, countries with high inequality have plutocratic governments, the US for instance, where the share of to 1 and 10 percent is 41.8 and 77.2 percent of the total wealth respectively (Zucman, 2016, p 42). This inequality is causing to economic elite domination in politics of the country. ‘A quite different theoretical tradition argues that U.S. policymaking is dominated by individuals who have substantial economic resources, i.e., high levels of income or wealth—including, but not limited to, ownership of business firms’ (Gilens and Page, 2014). Consequently, in plutocratic countries’ richest citizens govern a country and make rules in favor of themselves while disadvantaged ordinary people who make up most of the population of the country suffer from consequences of the rich-oriented policy. A case in point, since the star of a new millennium, many corporations and firms in the US are shipping their business to developing countries to gain from cheap workforce leaving millions of their compatriots out of job. “Growth in the U.S. goods trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2013 eliminated or displaced 3.2 million U.S. jobs, 2.4 million (three-fourths) of which were in manufacturing” (Kimball and Scott, 2014). Unless there was inequality, the government would probably be ruled by average people and would have prevented outsourcing jobs to foreign countries by all means. Another disadvantage of plutocratic government is pushing inequality to a far tougher level. As it said above, plutocrats govern a country in the way beneficial to them, which means they use laws to increase their wealth absorbing it from the nation. This makes a distressing situation in a country far more distressing, and may end up as ‘slavery of poor people’. Because if people 's wealth continually flows to