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Showing posts with the label "social inequality"

Twilight of Swedish Democracy

The Swedish model? By 1980 Sweden had the lowest income and gender inequality in the world. As a result of the neoliberal capitalist reforms from mid-1980s, "The current Swedish income distribution bears some resemblance to the English one of 1688. The average member of the richest 0.1 per cent has a disposable income, after tax and transfers, 38 times greater than that of the median-income earner. At the time of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, England’s temporal lords had an income 30 times that of urban middleclass merchants and traders."  Angust Maddison, Contours of World Economy, 1-2030 AD,   Oxford 2007, pp. 278-9 Wealth distribution has worsened even more, resulting in the most uneven pattern to be found in Western Europe, on a par with those of Brazil, South Africa or the  USA.  In 2002, Sweden’s top 1 per cent owned 18 per cent of all household wealth; by 2017, it had risen to 42 per cent. The National Education Authority (Skolverket) has found that a qu...
"There is no state in Lebanon" There is a state in Lebanon. It is present in other spheres, but obviously it is not there when it comes to social inequality. In fact it perpetrates social inequality like in many other countries, including rich ones (look at poverty in Britain or France, for example). Labaki, the director, does not criticise the state. A critique of the state in the review is Ms Naggar's addition. Also, there is a lot of "emotional extortion" instead of including a bigger picture of the state structure and social relations which spawn such social diseases. I have found this review (in Arabic) much better.