The holy trinity of Inequality!

Further to my previous post (fight inequality by creating inequality), I came across an article in the Economist; which raised an important point about inequality in modern (American) society; I thought I should share it. I will not try and para-phrase the message lest it looses its meaning. Read on:

A long ladder is fine, but it must have rungs
To many who would discredit American capitalism, this sort of cold-hearted number-crunching is beside the point. Any system in which the spoils are distributed so unevenly is morally wrong, they say. This newspaper disagrees. Inequality is not inherently wrong - as long as three conditions are met: first, society as a whole is getting richer; second, there is a safety net for the very poor; and third, everybody, regardless of class, race, creed or sex, has an opportunity to climb up through the system. A dynamic, fast-growing economy may sometimes look ugly, but it offers far more hope than a stagnant one for everybody in the United States…and I would argue the rest of the world too (excerpt from ‘Inequality and the American Dream’ (Jun 15th 2006 From The Economist print edition ).

I believe that the above argument could be put to the Indian social debacle too – but how do we fare against the ‘holy trinity’ mentioned above:

Is Indian society getting any richer by instituting draconian social reforms? Social welfare is the premise behind affirmative action but does not represent the ground reality, the poor are no better off today and ‘middle class’ pay the price for ineffectual social-reforms.

India claims to be a welfare state but has failed miserably to uplift the poor. Those that have made it out of poverty are a testament to their own entrepreneurial skills and not the States benevolence. Setting up a state support system for the poor and unemployed remains an unattainable dream for India’s social ‘planners’!

The economy is dynamic, the opportunities are many but are available to a few and their benefits are uni-directional i.e. the poor do not seem to benefit from the rapid economic growth that India is witnessing. There is a long way for the ‘India shinning’ moto to be truly representative of the country.

On face value then, ‘inequality’ as a by-product of social reform does not seem to have worked … but is that cause enough to loose faith in Social reforms?

The debate continues….