Social Justice Activism

study says that 25% of gap between the developed world and the developing world can
be attributed to global warming.
Mitigating Factors
Countries with a left-leaning legislature generally have lower levels of inequality. Many
factors constrain economic inequality – they may be divided into two classes:
government sponsored, and market driven. The relative merits and effectiveness of
each approach is a subject of debate.
Typical government initiatives to reduce economic inequality include:
Public education: increasing the supply of skilled labor and reducing income
inequality due to education differentials.
Progressive taxation: the rich are taxed proportionally more than the poor,
reducing the amount of income inequality in society if the change in taxation does
not cause changes in income.
Market forces outside of government intervention that can reduce economic inequality
include:
propensity to spend: with rising wealth & income, a person may spend more. In
an extreme example, if one person owned everything, they would immediately
need to hire people to maintain their properties, thus reducing the wealth
concentration.
Research shows that since 1300, the only periods with significant declines in wealth
inequality in Europe were the Black Death and the two World Wars. Historian Walter
Scheidel posits that, since the stone age, only extreme violence, catastrophes and
upheaval in the form of total war, Communist revolution, pestilence and state collapse
have significantly reduced inequality. He has stated that "only all-out thermonuclear war
might fundamentally reset the existing distribution of resources" and that "peaceful
policy reform may well prove unequal to the growing challenges ahead."
Effects
A lot of research has been done about the effects of economic inequality on different
aspects in society:
Health: British researchers Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have found
higher rates of health and social problems (obesity, mental
illness, homicides, teenage births, incarceration, child conflict, drug use) in
countries and states with higher inequality. Some studies link a surge in "deaths
of despair", suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol related deaths, to widening
income inequality.
Page 58 of 161