Shakes Report This Comment Date: July 22, 2023 05:31PM
Huh, the United States has the least percentage of poor people in the world.
All the communist and socialist countries have the most poor people. Capitalism
is such the great evil.
spaznut mcgraw Report This Comment Date: July 23, 2023 09:50AM
Yes, that's precisely what this graph says, good work.
I'm happy you're clearly joking
Anon Report This Comment Date: July 27, 2023 11:23AM
This should be called wealth distribution, as that's what it actually is.
Now add dominant religion, including protestant or catholic, education levels,
levels of foreign investment (that means dividends leaving the country) and is
there a culture of saving/investing?
Then there are other factors:
+ In Australia we have a population in two halves, one lives large and grabs all
the headlines. The other saves and invests. Now, after four generations, half
our population are the beneficiaries of private companies and family trusts.
The sums are sometimes small, but it affects the graph above and is a society of
two halves moving in different directions.
+ 'Four generations' is the time frame since yanks infiltrated politics in our
countries and preached tax cuts, as these eventually benefit the wealthiest the
most. They later called this 'Trickle Down Economics', where wealth is trickled
down from the many in number to the few in number, then 'Quantitative Easing'
has exacerbated this.
+ 'Four generations' is also the time frame of Australia's greatest gift to the
world: The Living Wages Case, that gives freedom, and residual wealth, to
individuals, not corporations. Those are two incompatible definitions of
freedom, and why Australia has been so resilient to economic shocks.
+ How do the central banks work? Do they manufacture the money? Do they lend
it at interest? Do they invest it to create sovereign wealth funds? Do they
fund infrastructure projects? Time is money, so regions with poor roads have
less economic viability than those that have good ones. That's why the
political party just ousted in Australia walked away from The National Roads
Agreement: anywhere over 200kms from the capital cities the roads are
collapsing, economic viability will follow. That's why the Party did it: it
concentrates wealth.
+ Then there's how proactive governments are: do they protect their industries
with tariffs and/or import quotas? Does government, often the single biggest
employer and customer, make a point of buying goods manufactured within the
nation, rather than imports? Does it joint invest with private industry to
found new industries or expand existing ones?
+ What's the size of the public service compared to the population?
Bureaucracy is a burden on a population, necessary to have, but the size isn't.
+ What's the comparative size of political donations to fund political parties?
A party that charges a quarter of an ounce of gold a year for membership has no
need of corporate donations and listens to its members. A party that charges
one percent of that, well, an English proverb is: "He who pays the piper
calls the tune."
+ How concentrated is the media? If a few companies control journalist's
careers, they present/write what they are told. I've heard the threat Murdoch
used in the 1990's: "You can have a praise a day or a bucket of [sewer] a
day". Apparently he now just asks "What's in it for me?" So he
doesn't need to make political donations.
+ What's the promoted use of money? Where I come from I was asked "What
would you do with [equals four thousand ounces of gold]? I would buy a house on
a quarter of that and invest most of the rest, so as to live on less than my
income and invest the rest, so it always grows. It's a concept in one of Jane
Austen's books (she moved in what we would now call professorial circles,
compare with the language Charles Dickens used and the concepts he adds - their
life spans overlapped). Is the promoted use of money to just spend it?
+ What happens to political dissidents?
+ Does a religion crush non members/dissidents?
Really, that graph needs a lot more to go with it. If you want to achieve
anything constructive.