These are troubled times. As the echoes of the war die away the sound of a new conflict rises on our ears. Strike follows upon strike. Unless you are exceptionally coldblooded, it’s hard not to be disturbed by today’s huge economic inequality. The gap between the rich and the poor is enormous.
As a citizen, I simply just want to be able to pay my bills and buy food. I want a safe place to sleep. These are basic things in life but they are getting harder and harder to achieve with each passing day.
Economic inequality is measured by looking at the distribution of wealth and income in a society, not the general wealth of a country. At a basic level, a country’s overall economic success does predict its people’s well-being, but the healthiest and happiest countries in the world are not the richest. Rather, they are countries where wealth is shared widely and more equally.
The human mind, lost in a maze of inequalities that it cannot explain and evils that it cannot remedy, must adapt itself as best it can. An acquired indifference to the ills of others is the price at which we live. A certain dole of sympathy, a casual mite of personal relief is the mere drop that any one of us alone can cast into the vast ocean of human misery. Beyond that we must harden ourselves lest we too perish. We feed well while others starve. We make fast the doors of our lighted houses against the indigent and the hungry. What else can we do? If we shelter one what is that? And if we try to shelter all, we are ourselves without shelter.
The poverty of earlier days was the outcome of the insufficiency of human labor to meet the primal needs of human kind. It is not so now. We live in an age that is at best about a century and a half old – the age of machinery and power. Our common reading of history has obscured this fact. Its pages are filled with the purple gowns of kings and the scarlet trappings of the warrior. Its record is largely that of battles and sieges, of the brave adventure of discovery and the vexed slaughter of the nations. It has long since dismissed as too short and simple for its pages, the short and simple annals of the poor. And the record is right enough. Of the poor what is there to say? They were born; they lived; they died. They followed their leaders, and their names are forgotten.
But we do not commonly realize the vastness of the change. Much of our life and much of our thought still belongs to the old world. Our education is still largely framed on the old pattern. And our views of poverty and social betterment, or what is possible and what is not, are still largely conditioned by it.
The rewards and punishments of the economic world are singularly unequal. One man earns as much in a week or even in a day as another does in a year. This man by hard, manual labor makes only enough to pay for humble shelter and plain food. This other by what seems a congenial activity, fascinating as a game of chess, acquires uncounted millions. A third stands idle in the market place asking in vain for work. A fourth lives upon rent, dozing in his chair, and neither toils nor spins. A fifth by the sheer hazard of a lucky “deal” acquires a fortune without work at all.
Crime rate has also been shown to be correlated with inequality in society. Most studies looking into the relationship have concentrated on homicides – since homicides are almost identically defined across all nations and jurisdictions. There have been over fifty studies showing tendencies for violence to be more common in societies where income differences are larger. Research has been conducted comparing developed countries with undeveloped countries, as well as studying areas within countries.
“One study in Finland found that mortality rates were twice as high in the poorest people as in the richest, a much less stark difference than that seen in Whitehall, where bottom-of-the-ladder folks had a threefold higher mortality risk than those at the top.”
I do not mean to have a society with equal lifestyle among the citizens – it is not possible. In other words, inequality is usual around the world, however I mean that the government should think of an effective measure to lower the graph of poverty and to narrow down the wide gap between the poor and the rich. It is believed that the re-distributive measure and ending political instability will help to reduce this gap to a large extent.
The economic inequality in some places is much more drastic than in others. For example, in countries where there is a lack of social service systems, the disparities may be most obvious. While some people are extremely wealthy, others may suffer inhumane situations such as starvation and lack of basic necessities. In countries where there are social service programs, the gap between the lowest economic class and the highest is generally narrower, but there are still major differences in the lifestyles of the groups.
Currently, economic constraints have been changed to a great worry for the Afghan citizens. The main reason behind the problem is the long-term ambiguity in election result. The investors show no more tendencies to invest in the country – therefore the youths wander in the streets without job. The candidates are asked to break the deadlock as soon as possible and put an end to their own political benefits – which have put the life and property of the citizens at risk.