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#inequality — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #inequality, aggregated by home.social.

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  1. 989 people in the U.S., out of 340 million, are billionaires. 3,428 people, out of 8.3 billion, worldwide as of March 2026.

    That's roughly one in every 2.4 million humans. A tiny group of the human population and yet they do disproportionate damage to the planet and its people.

    We are destroying the Earth to create wealth for these men. It doesn't have to stay this way. We can change this.

    forbes.com/sites/pr/2026/03/10

    #inequality #oligarchy #democracy

  2. What places on Earth are most resilient to global catastrophic risk? Our new review in Global Challenges is the first study to look at this across nuclear war, near-Earth objects, large volcanic eruptions, cyberattacks, high altitude electromagnetic pulse, geomagnetic storms and pandemics.

    Australia is plausibly the most resilient place, but even it is reliant on trade for fuel, medicine and fertiliser. There is no place on Earth which is a complete refuge.

    Four factors appeared most consistently: geographic isolation, self-sufficiency in food production, governance quality (democratic institutions, low inequality, low corruption, social cohesion) and decentralisation. The first two are largely fixed. The last two are modifiable through policy, improve resilience against every category of catastrophe we examined, and also make societies better places to live. All of them are currently trending the wrong way, which is bad, but also means we can work towards a more resilient and more livable society at the same time.

    Open access in Global Challenges: doi.org/10.1002/gch2.70146
    Longer summary on my blog: existentialcrunch.substack.com
    Data and code: github.com/allfed/gcr-resilien

    #GlobalCatastrophicRisk #NuclearWar #NuclearWinter #Supervolcano #Food #Resilience #Inequality

  3. Scrapping of Berlin swimming day for Black children becomes latest in long list of race-linked pool rows
    By Ashifa Kassam European community affairs correspondent

    Rightwing voices seize on plans to offer Black children an exclusive afternoon at an outdoor pool in the German capital

    theguardian.com/world/2026/aug

    #Germany #Race #Europe #Swimming #Inequality #Socialexclusion #Society #TheGuardian #AshifaKassamEuropeancommunityaffairscorrespondent

  4. Climate change and corruption are also driving up interest rates
    Climate costs will dwarf AI

    * "...Trust in all institutions, including governments, is in decline, in tech companies as protests break out over data centres on top of anxiety about the impact of AI, and in governments, because of corruption."

    "Transparency International has just released its corruption perception indices for 2025, and it's getting worse almost everywhere, including Australia, down from 10th to 12th place."

    "The widespread popular dissatisfaction with the working of modern American capitalism may be the product of some real, objective problems in the way American capitalism is working: income and wealth inequality on a scale not seen in a century; the concentration of economic, cultural and increasingly political power in a class of technology leaders whose products are dissolving the bonds that keep society together; the tightening nexus between business elites and the people who control the political process; rampant corruption and a political establishment that doesn't seem interested in accountability; the revival, after decades of stable prices, of inflationary pressures that are pushing the cost of living to painful levels.” The Wall Street Journal editor, Gerard Baker

    "..Temperatures would be various degrees of catastrophic … and expensive, for governments, companies and households." >>
    abc.net.au/news/2026-08-24/cli

    * 'Exceptional' summer heatwaves in Europe hurting economy
    abc.net.au/news/2026-08-24/sum
    #ClimateCosts #Climate #corruption #FossilFuels #ClimateAction #heatwaves #disasters #debt #inequality #corruption #trust

  5. @codinghorror
    [email protected]

    Nice project! Wow, 124 replies and counting. Hope mine don't just duplicate many.

    Additional wealth inequality songs:

    The Beach Boys—Fun, Fun, Fun (Til Her Daddy Takes the T-bird Away)

    Rod MacDonald—American Jerusalem (Somebody must’ve got double ‘cause I got none)

    Desmond Dekker—Israelites

    Brett Dennen—Ain't No Reason

    Paul Simon—American Tune

    Leonard Cohen—Everybody Knows

    Warren Zevon—Lawyers, Guns and Money

    #Politics #Music #Inequality #Money

  6. @codinghorror

    You will kick yourself for omitting this if you know the lyrics, especially the slightly more challenging ones he sang live ...

    "Praying For Time" by George Michael

    As Matthew Hocter from Albumism wrote, it "examines the many social injustices faced by so many, questions the listener into the conditioning that society has created and why it can be so hard to be kind to one another ... Timeless and still so relevant in this day and age."

    #music #playlist #inequality

  7. I'm re-reading the Garib v. The Netherlands judgement of the European Court of Human Rights (Grand Chamber) from 2017.

    Judge Kuris so disappointed in his colleagues that he quotes Leonard Cohen in his dissenting opinion:

    ‘Everybody knows the fight was fixed
    The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
    That’s how it goes
    Everybody knows’.

    hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-1

    #law #discrimination #inequality

  8. youtube.com/watch?v=uugCv1ZH_IM

    The CEO of Australia's biggest super fund says the biggest issues in the Australian economy are:

    1. #housing
    2. #inequality
    3. #productivity

    And our high housing debt means we can't invest in productivity-producing assets #auspol

    Crossposted with @openvibe

  9. The triple-lock on UK state-pensions was always intended to be a response to international comparisons of pensioner poverty... and so, that is how it should be judges as a policy.

    A comparison of UK pensioner poverty (still standing at 15% of all state pensioners) with other OECD countries suggests not only should the triple-lock stay, but that especially against European comparators it's yet to achieve a comparable level of financial security for the post-67s.

    #pensions #politics #inequality

  10. The American Dream
    You have to be asleep to believe it.
    George Carlin

    Remember son-pardoner Biden's "strong economy" and the price of eggs?

    Statistical mean and median of personal wealth is one of many tricks employed to keep the myth alive . The good author, Ben Norton, generously attributes them partly to ignorance. Nonetheless, he brings the receipts.

    (No, Biden is not blamed. That comment is mine.)

    geopoliticaleconomy.com/2026/0

    #USpol #inequality #politics

  11. “the Richmond metropolitan statistical area — a region defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as the city and 16 surrounding localities — “had the second largest increase in housing costs relative to young adults’ wages” after the Charlottesville region. Both have gotten influxes of new residents from the Washington, D.C. area and more high-cost parts of the Northeast.” #cville #RVA #housing #inequality richmonder.org/data-housing-is

  12. #Food insecurity is a big concern in #NYC, but Zohran's proposals do not make any mention of food #cooperatives . Why? Check out latest video on my #YouTube channel Unabashed #Utopian about the issue. #Mamdani #DSA #socialism #brooklyn #inequality #poverty

  13. Has Trump no shame about all the money he has made since being in office? | Francine Prose
    By Francine Prose

    By now we know that charity, generosity and compassion are virtues that the US president doesn’t seem to have even in trace amounts

    theguardian.com/commentisfree/

    #DonaldTrump #USnews #USpolitics #Incomeinequality #Inequality #USeconomy #TheGuardian #FrancineProse

  14. A briefing for your MP.
    Mine have in the past cited the idea that public ownership would be expensive. This brief report sets out why that's not the case. One of the implied arguments is that shareholders have taken 13bn in divi's so they've had their compensation by stripping the value out of the company while not really investing in it.
    weownit.org.uk/act-now/email-y
    #WeOwnIt #ThamesWater #inequality #UKpolitics #PublicOwnership

    It also mentions why mutualising or turning it into a co-op is probably not appropriate in this case.

  15. WE BUILT AN EXTRACTION MACHINE.
    AND CALLED IT PROGRESS? 💎

    It's becoming increasingly clear that we are having the wrong argument about AI.

    The question is not simply whether AI is good or bad.

    The much bigger question is: who benefits?

    Alvin Wang Graylin makes a point in this TEDx talk that I think deserves far more attention.

    AI is becoming cheaper, more capable and more widely available. That should be extraordinary news. But at the same time, enormous amounts of capital are being poured into a race dominated by a handful of companies, investors and technology giants.

    Graylin describes the result as a K-shaped economy: capital goes one way, labour goes the other. The people who own the systems become richer. The people whose work is replaced, reduced or devalued are told that this is simply progress.

    I don’t think that is good enough. Do you?

    I’m excited about AI. I use it for something every day. As a disabled person, I can already see how transformative it could become when technology finally adapts to me instead of forcing me to adapt to the machines.

    We can already see AI improving aspects of medicine, education, accessibility, communication and countless ordinary parts of life.

    But if all that increased productivity simply transfers more wealth and power upward, we haven’t created abundance.

    WE'VE CREATED AN EXTRAORDINARILY EFFICIENT EXTRACTION MACHINE.

    Graylin argues that AI should increasingly be treated as a public good, with regulation, social safety nets and deliberate attempts to distribute its benefits more widely.

    That seems to me to be the real political question of AI.

    Not whether the machines become intelligent.

    Whether we are intelligent enough to decide who they are for.

    youtu.be/0mZwaUUKlQE?si=sBnDEk

    @3goodthings@DigitalCoup@meditation@economics_that_works@startrek

    #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #FutureOfWork #Inequality #Accessibility #Technology #PublicGood #Economics #political