The world is just a street.  Unfortunately it’s on a hill.  At the top of the hill live the rich folks at the bottom live the poorest.  Everything flows downhill, everything from effluent to goodwill.  There may be other slopes too, liberalism,  totalitarianism not forgetting dictatorship and degrees of corruption.

No matter how liberal we think we are, virtually everyone aspires to live at the top of the hill, no one aspires to live at the bottom, though many live there, not by choice of course.

The idealist would like to see the hill flattened out whilst the very structure of capitalism dictates the gradient must remain.  Most would agree though the steepness of the gradient is the key question.

In my life time the gradient has got steeper both in local and global terms. There are variations in the overall picture.  Take China for example where human rights are not what Europeans would call liberal, far from it, but there is no question that the government in China are in their own way trying to slacken the gradient.  To create a middle class, to facilitate and large number of their citizens to move up their national street. In other countries like Venezuela there has been a large shift to the left, which set out to achieve the redistribution of resources and thus flatten the national gradient.  Sadly, as often happens the radical reform in this case left has become unstuck because of incompetence, corruption and lack of leadership.

The stunning fact remains that 97% of the world’s wealth is controlled by a very small 3% of the population. So the world street is indeed a very steep hill