Those with a capitalist cheerleading bent might want to put down the pom-poms and statistics and fancy charts for just a moment – lay people are speaking.

There’s an organisation (whose name I’ve forgotten) doing the rounds with research-backed TED talks and whatever else… (can’t find ‘em, my google-fu is weak today) about how societal ills correlate spectacularly well with the gap between the haves and the have-nots in any society.

Specifically, they conclude that  it doesn’t matter how rich or poor people are, (and by implication, where they are on the social pecking order)… it only really matters how BIG THE GAP is between the two extremes of rich and poor. When the gap is huge, as has rather become the case in most nations/cities/societies planet-wide, you can expect increases in crime, corruption, medical problems, mental illness, teenage pregnancies, you name it…

Half of the planet – let us call them group A – hears this and says,
“well, DUH? How is this news?”.

The other half – let us call them group B – says,
“That’s a load of crap. The real problem is the poverty end of the spectrum, not the spectrum or the gap per se”.

Both groups can agree on one thing: that if you have any sort of spectrum of wellbeing at all you necessarily have a gap, and by dint of that, “THE POOR”. Whether those “poor” people are millionaires surrounded by insufferable trillionaires, or whether they are garbage-surfing grovellers surrounded by those who have found the day’s meal, their condition shall be perfectly irrelevant to the fact of the gap’s actual existence. Continue reading →