Economic Inequality In Society

“The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” This is a thought recorded many years ago by one of the greatest economists Adam Smith where he talks about the attitudes towards the so called rich, and the poor people in societies. With this in mind, what is it with economic inequality between people?

Income inequality refers to how evenly or unevenly income is distributed in a society (Sutter, 2013). Economic inequality can also be briefly described as the difference between individuals or populations in the distribution of their assets, wealth, or income. The term typically refers to inequality among individuals and groups within a society, but can also refer to inequality between countries. Its history can also be briefly summed up under: leaders and their subjects, slavery, and the Industrial revolution. Dealing with the first point, leadership can described as a process, where there is organization of a group (subjects) to achieve a common goal. Leaders are generally in a position where the income they earn is much more, or higher than that of their subjects. The leaders are then seen as better off than their subjects because of the large difference of wealth, assets or income between them. The second point goes on to talk about slavery; when slavery was introduced, the people who bought the slaves were assumed to be wealthy. The slaves were also not seen to be people who deserved high income or wages and were therefore paid according to their masters. The second point which is the industrial revolution has its time occurrence argued out...

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...tandard of living. No one really knows the future, but it doesn’t hurt to try and predict it using the past. This is why judging by the past of economic inequality between people, increased poverty, increased unemployment and higher standard of living are seen to be the future predictions.

With all this talk on economic inequality between people, looking at the history, current, trends and the predictions of the future, it is seen that basically everything that surrounds economic inequality is of some form of negativity. It can also be seen that something such as this was inevitable. The only way to go through it is by finding measures to curb the negative predictions of the future. I end here with a quote from Thomas Frank ‘’Massive inequality, we have learned, isn't the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it's also profoundly ugly’’.