They Might Be Giants: Social Justice and the Forgotten Scotland
By Gerry Hassan
A new vogue has swept across the globe: concern about inequality.
From the Davos World Economic Forum to Occupy Wall Street, from Barack Obama to David Cameron and Ed Miliband, there is an acute awareness of this issue, from talking about the superabundant wealth of the top 1% to the constant political chatter about ‘fairness’.
The world is perilously unequal and growing more so. One billion people per day go hungry while another one billion are obese. GDP per capita of the richest and poorest tenths of the world has a ratio of 39:1, between households of 98:1.
The last quarter of the 20th century saw a spiralling of increasing inequality. Sub-Saharan Africa saw its GDP per capita fall by 0.5% per annum on average between 1975 and 2005. Central and Southern America saw by 2000 average incomes at 84% of 1980 levels; and in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that figure over the same period fell to 70% of 1980 value.
In the same period, the UK and the US have become two of the most unequal countries in the developed world; the US the second most unequal and the UK the fourth, with Singapore in first place and Portugal third
read on: http://www.gerryhassan.com/uncategorized/they-might-be-giants-social-justice-and-the-forgotten-scotland/#more-2209
