{"id":7101,"date":"2011-11-08T13:30:44","date_gmt":"2011-11-08T12:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=7101"},"modified":"2011-11-09T00:42:09","modified_gmt":"2011-11-08T23:42:09","slug":"the-high-price-of-excessive-inequality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=7101","title":{"rendered":"The high price of excessive inequality"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>&#8220;If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The\u00a0claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves \u2013 that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive \u2013 are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren&#8217;t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is the opening of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/commentisfree\/2011\/nov\/07\/one-per-cent-wealth-destroyers\">today&#8217;s column<\/a> in the &#8216;Guardian&#8221; by George Moniot who always writes in a stimulating manner and on challenging subjects. He goes on to point out:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12% between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10th rose by 37%. The\u00a0Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The\u00a0claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves \u2013 that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive \u2013 are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-current-affairs","category-british-current-affairs","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7101"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7110,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7101\/revisions\/7110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}