WorldPress.org‘s Alaina Navarez reports on the wealth gap in Latin America:
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, inequality has increased sevenfold, and the average income of the richest 10 percent of the population is now nine times the average of the poorest. The richest 1 percent of the population in Latin America already own 41 percent of the region’s wealth. By 2022, the top 1 percent are projected to have more wealth than the remaining 99 percent. If this trend continues, will recent progress slip away? The labor market, education, healthcare and technology help shed light on the issue.
While the point here is that most of the population is being left behind, I’m projecting a little larger to the competition between nations. Today, the wealth of a nation isn’t its gold or equivalent, or most anything else – but the intelligence of the citizenry, gender and ethnic background be damned. That’s why ethnic cleansing is the mark of a failed country.
And in the competition of nations, the country with the highest average productive training is the country who will “win”, while those who permit the greed of the top percentile to run rampant – they risk being left far behind, as usual, at the very least; violence is always a possibility if those countrymen being left behind perceive they have been treated unfairly and the government is unwilling to step in.
Of course, competition between nations is an interesting topic. What does winning mean? We used to fight wars almost as a matter of course, but amongst First World countries we now avoid it, only venting our violence on smaller countries which then adapt new strategies to strike back. Now we persist in measuring countries against each other, with the unspoken subtext: We’re better than them. From life expectancy to the distribution of wealth, we strive to be the best.
And why?
Because that’s what we’ve always done. We can call it an old evolutionary strategy, but it’s still a vibrant part of our lives, and so we strive to be better, by some measure, than the guy across the street, the city across the river, the country over in Europe.
And these days, we talk about technological progress and how that betters our lives. It’s more civilized; the fruits of one country can be easily shared to others; they may or may not find it psychologically oppressive even as they use their smartphones just as we do. So it does leave me to wonder – if the bread & circuses are provided in sufficient quantity, will it really matter that some 1% control more wealth than the 99%? Will the control that the 1% can buy with that wealth so offend the 99% that rioting will break out?
Or will the callousness of the rich be such that the bread & circuses will not be provided until it’s too late to mollify the 99%?
