Inequality and human development

“What is it that impels the powerful and vocal lobby to press for greater equality?” asked Margaret Thatcher, then UK prime minister, in 1975. She offered her own answer: “Often the reason boils down to an undistinguished combination of envy and bourgeois guilt.” Plato took a different view. Writing in the fifth century BC he warned Athenian lawmakers of the threat posed by extreme inequality. “There should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor again excessive wealth”, he wrote, “for both are productive of great evil.”

Related Subject(s): Economic and Social Development