Solve Income Inequality

[Mopsus]

Step 1: First World countries return the billions (trillions) of dollars they've expropriated from Third World countries over the years (and affluent areas within the First and Third Worlds do the same to the impoverished ares within them).

Step 2: Keep most future wealth within the communities that produce them.

Problem solved.

[Mopsus]

Step 1: First World countries return the billions (trillions) of dollars they've expropriated from Third World countries over the years (and affluent areas within the First and Third Worlds do the same to the impoverished ares within them).

Step 2: Keep most future wealth within the communities that produce them.

Problem solved.

I'm sorry but a) that is nonsense and b) Step 2 doesn't actually work. You'd have to be completely ignorant of the history of economic development and macroeconomics to think that would be a solution.

...or is that just what you WANT us to think?

[Mopsus]

Differences in capital endowment or resources isn't a great predictor of national wealth.

But isn't that because of the exploitation I mentioned?

[Mopsus]

Huh? You wanted to redistribute things to rectify poverty. I pointed out that since the current distribution isn't the main driver of the inequality it'd not be the best solution to the problem.

The unequal distribution of wealth isn't the main driver of poverty?

[Mopsus]

Considering how much worldwide poverty has dropped over the past few decades, I think it's safe to say that increasing the size of the worldwide economic pie is far more important than redistributing it, at least with respect to third world countries. 

We've never tried redistributing it, so we wouldn't know.

[Mopsus]

Considering how much worldwide poverty has dropped over the past few decades, I think it's safe to say that increasing the size of the worldwide economic pie is far more important than redistributing it, at least with respect to third world countries.  

We've never tried redistributing it, so we wouldn't know.

 Oh really?

Even if we accept that every one of those countries made a good faith effort to democratize their economies (which... umm...), none of them falls under the category of "rich country compensating poor countries for decades of exploitation, plus giving them a fair shake in the future".

[Mopsus]

We've given trillions of dollars in foreign aid to those poor countries over the decades.

...which, I'm sure you would agree, has not always been spent in the wisest of ways.

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It's true that poverty is the natural state of mankind. It's also true that many more people inhabit that state than need to.

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Of course, some places in the West seem to be slowly leaping backwards...

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Africa's social problems may have prevented corporations from building factories there, but they haven't prevented them from extracting natural resources from that continent. How evenly distributed have the profits from that enterprise been?

[Mopsus]

Yes, differences in capital endowment explain only a tiny fraction of GDP per capita differences. We can also look at things like development aid having pretty much zero correlation with economic growth for poor countries.

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lol

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It might, if it were used to empower the people of those countries to take control of their economic destinies.

[Mopsus]

If this hasn't been made clear already, I want to explicitly point out that I do not favor dumping trillions of dollars into third world countries without having any idea of how that money will be spent, or what long-term impact it will have. What I do favor is the exact kind of institutional and economic investment that went into Europe following World War II, or, to a different extent, that has gone into China since the 1970s... just done in a less exploitative way.