Inequality isn’t my favourite hobby horse, mainly because:
- “Fair” and “equal [being / having the same]” are often (wrongly) assumed to be the same thing;
- “Equal [being / having the same]” and “[of] equal [worth]” also seem to get conflated;
- I don’t think that “equality [being / having the same]” for all people is possible or desirable, assuming that we’re generally in favour of freedom and diversity.
- It seems to me that pointing out what wealthier people ought to do can easily become a way of obscuring what we could and should do. (It’s easy to say “Jeff Bezos could eliminate malaria if he gave X percent of his wealth to it,” and turn a blind eye to the several thousand dollars or pounds that you could give towards the same goal.
But all of that’s not to say that I don’t think ludicrous inequality of wealth is worth our attention and probably our action, and this amazing graphic showing the wealth of some of the world’s richest people to scale (probably best opened on a computer screen) shows just how ridiculous things are.
Recommend.
HT: Sharky
Yes, this graphic is astonishing! But what are the implications? Amazon is so extraordinary, because it completely transforms shopping, helping many millions of ordinary people to save a lot of money and improve their lives, at the expense of traditional shops. I suppose it is survival of the fittest. So do we accept that this is the way the world works or do we fight? With the pandemic, we could have simply let things happen (as has been done with allowing Amazon to rule the world). More people would have died in the short time, but there would be more resources left for those who survived, less people would have been unemployed, scheduled medical treatment could have continued (saving many lives), and we could have had a more varied diet of news other than pandemic, pandemic, and items related to the pandemic. (By the way, do India and Indonesia still exist? I haven’t noticed them mentioned on BBC News recently?)