At 17:39 20/07/2011, Ed wrote:
From today's Globe & Mail. The growing gap
between rich and poor has been a source of much
argument and concern in the US. We, in Canada,
have been reading about it but smugly thinking
that it's their problem not ours. Well, maybe we have little to be smug about.
No, you haven't. And neither has any advanced
country. As we proceed further and further into a
more specialized world then the gap between the
rich (generally well educated) and the poor
(generally insufficiently educated) will grow
wider. Social mobility in all advanced countries
is declining. Unless and until governments shed
their educational monopoly for most children, and
maintain the legalization of protective practices
for the professions, then there's little hope
that there'll be anything like a fairer, more gradated income society than now.
Keith
Ed
----------
Do we care that Canada is an unequal
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JEFFREY SIMPSON
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Jul. 20, 2011 2:00AM EDT
The poor, it is said, will always be with us.
Yes, but how many poor must there be?
In Canada, there are too many poor people. The
country that often likes to congratulate itself
cant take comfort from an inescapable fact:
Were becoming a more unequal society.
Legislative committees and think tanks sometimes
work on poverty, but, for the general public,
income inequalities are consigned to the
dead-letter box in this apparently conservative
age. Even the NDP, which takes poverty more
seriously than the other parties, has taken to
talking incessantly about the middle class,
figuring thats where the voters are and where
the poor would rather be if they could
The Conference Board of Canada, hardly a bastion
of far-left thinking, just reminded Canadians
about the growing income inequalities in their society.
The richest group of Canadians, those in the top
fifth of income earners, saw their share of
national income rise from 1993 to 2008. Within
that fortunate group, the biggest gainers were
the super rich, the top 1 per cent. And they got
even richer not so much from investments but
from basic salaries of the kind paid bank presidents and company CEOs.
From 1980 to 2005, the earnings of the top
group rose by 16.4 per cent, while
middle-income Canadians incomes stagnated, and
earnings for those in the bottom group slid.
There are various ways of measuring inequality.
One is the Gini coefficent, which tracks
inequality on a scale of 0 to 1, with 0 being a
world of total equality and 1 being total inequality.
Canada, it turns out, ranks 12 among 17
comparable countries in income inequality.
Canadas Gini score is 0.32, slightly worse than
that of Australia and Germany, and far behind
Denmark (0.23), Sweden (0.23), Finland (0.26)
and Norway (0.27) The United States and Britain,
two countries against which Canada measures
itself, are the worst performers that is, the
most unequal societies of the 17. Put another
way, anglophone countries are the most unequal,
at least compared with continental European
ones, and two of them (the U.S. and the U.K.)
are also in desperate fiscal shape.
The U.S. Gini score is 0.38, reflecting the fact
that income inequality is at a record high,
greater even than during the Roaring Twenties.
During the past decade, the top 10 per cent of
U.S. earners took 49.7 per cent of income gains.
In Canada, the top fifth of income earners take
39.2 per cent of total income (up from 35 per
cent in the 1980s), while the lowest quintile
takes 7.2 per cent. Vancouver has the highest
share of people in the lowest quintile of
earners among Canadian cities; Quebec City has the lowest.
So why are we a more unequal society? Thats the
subject of fierce debate. Other countries
income inequalities are also growing, albeit to
varying degrees, and the inequalities in big
developing countries such as China, India and
Brazil are much higher than anything in Canada or Europe.
Its argued that globalization rewards some of
the highly skilled (and people who can
manipulate other peoples money, as in hedge
funds, banking and financial services), while
leaving others behind. Clearly, the struggles of
manufacturing in North America and Europe have
robbed those societies of millions of
good-paying, often unionized, jobs. Some of
these have been replaced by better-paying service-sector jobs; most have not.
The Conference Board notes that government
transfer programs flatten out some inequalities,
but not as effectively as 20 years ago.
Unemployment benefits go to fewer people;
welfare rates havent always kept up with the cost of living.
Many of the Harper governments tax cuts, for
example, have disproportionately benefited those
better off, since theyre not geared to income
as in all those itsy-bitsy bribes for sports
equipment, the GST cut and the child benefit
cheques than come through the mail every month.
Committees of both the House of Commons and
Senate have issued reports on poverty; neither
stirred much interest. Income inequalities are
apparently not deemed important subjects in this self-centered age.
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/07/
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