STWR - Share The World's Resources

Privatisation, free trade and market forces. . . the rich world insists poor states play by our rules. But they don't work. Is it time to let countries determine their own destinies, asks Duncan Green.

To speak of a second Gilded Age is now a cliche - but as it draws to a close, the real question is 'what happens next?', writes Doug Henwood in The Nation magazines special issue on the New Inequality.

The working class may have failed Marx's vision, but the new 'grave-diggers of capitalism' will almost certainly turn out to be those who have gutted the earth of its treasures.

Google "second Gilded Age" and you will get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can learn more about what you already instinctively know. That we are living through a gilded age has become a journalistic commonplace. 

As if to demonstrate that poverty is now a residual issue in the world, the poor are being slowly eliminated from the imagery of the busy global media.

Could it be possible to eradicate abject poverty in one lifetime? Ever since it was first asked, the question has seemed an improbable wish – a salve for the heart, untenable to the mind. But today, the answer is as clear as it is imperative: Yes.