The Munk Debates
In this series, Rudyard Griffiths, chair of the Munk Debates, Canada’s leading public-affairs forum, discusses issues and trends just over the horizon with renowned analysts and policy-makers.
“The debate over economic inequality has gone global since the 2011 Occupy movements. Yet, the last five years have seen little, if any, concrete action by governments on the issue. Why the disconnect?
I think one of the main reasons is that, in the years following 2008 and the global financial crisis, our collective attention was focused on survival. Would the economy recover? Could we get it to grow again? What would we do about employment? There is a political element in this as well. In the first three years of recovery in the United States, 91 per cent of all the income gains went to the upper 1 per cent. For an economy that claims to be a success, this is an outrage. Seventy per cent of Americans believe it is an outrage; they believe something should be done. And yet our fractured politics in Washington and the ideology of the right has put up road block after road block to prevent meaningful reform,” wrote Rudyard Griffiths Special to The Globe and Mail last Friday May 8, 2015.
Griffiths continued, “Where does the debate over inequality go from here?
Whenever you have the kind of economic inequality that we have in the United States and in other countries, it translates into political inequality. Some of the people at the top understandably want to keep the current system working for their benefit. So, this is not going to be an easy battle. But I think there is an increasingly large number of people who understand that things are not working and that we are not living in the land of opportunity that we thought we were. Ultimately, I am optimistic, given that the issue of economic inequality has reached the top of the public agenda. There are now grassroots movements in the context of minimum wages and, when I talk”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Read the full article here.
Raymond Matt, CFP, CLU, TEP, CHS
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