More than 1.4 billion people live in poverty so extreme that they can barely survive, and around 25,000 people die from hunger each day whilst a new billionaire is created every second day. The call for a global safety net has never been so urgent - and compels the international community to transform economic priorities and guarantee the universal securing of basic human needs.
Stop being a compliant consumer. Face the ugly truth. Don’t get fooled by the stock market. Accept the need for the mistreated middle class to become the revolutionary class. The British military establishment's most prestigious think tank sees what too few over-consuming Americans are willing to anticipate. Unjustified and mounting economic inequality is planting the seeds for global economic conflict.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world's foremost economists, is this years host at the Reith Lectures. Hosted by Sue Lawley and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Sach will argue over five talks that the world is in a period of turbulent transition and that the biggest challenges need to be navigated by broader and deeper global co-operation. In this first lecture, Bursting at the Seams, Sachs outlines that the 21st century will be marked by severe natural resource limits, the rise of new economic powers and the threats of failed states. These are tectonic changes with the potential to unleash global-scale upheavals, he says. Global cooperation of an unprecedented depth and scale will be needed, but we are not yet prepared for such cooperation. A transcript of the first lecture follows below.
When it comes to the exorbitant pay of America's corporate chief executive officers, everyone likes to quote Louis Brandeis, who said ''sunshine is the best disinfectant.''
Americans have always accepted a certain level of economic inequality as the inevitable consequence of an open capitalist society where some people through their own efforts do better than others. The presumption is that there is fairness in the marketplace and economic system. What a quaint, outdated belief.
The United States could dramatically reduce poverty – if it really wanted to. Instead, the number of American households in severe poverty (those with incomes less than half that of the official poverty level) has been growing, not shrinking.
Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans - those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 - receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows.The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.
