And since great disparities of wealth make the wealthy contemptuous of the poor and the poor envious of the rich, capitalism can create conditions that cause class conflict, labour unrest, and political instability.
When the forty-niner Peter Decker died in 1888, the Marysville, Calif., newspaper gave him an epitaph that anyone could envy: "Success in accumulation of wealth makes many men arrogant and pretentious, but it had no such effect upon Mr. Decker".
I am interested in this because--as you might guess from my first response--a lack of wealth makes it very difficult to manage income volatility.
These exaggerated fair distributions of resources, including common resource pools of beans for the future, redistributions of wealth making countries more equally wealthy, and plans to donate beans in cases of future crises, which are not commonly seen in international negotiations.
This is something that all middle-class Americans should support simply because the concentration of wealth makes it more difficult for them to obtain a middle-class standard of living.
But while these very real problems require research, understanding and remedy, the growing income disparity and concentration of wealth make it impossible for our society to address these issues.
This may be particularly true for women as in the cohorts we consider the entwinement of female family trajectories with other aspects of the life course, including labour market participation and acquisition of wealth, makes disentangling their implications for health very difficult.
Leila Trabelsi, the politically ambitious wife of Tunisia's Zine AliAbidine Ben Ali, was easily the most detested, a monstrous symbol of nepotism and corruption, whose embezzlement of state wealth made Imelda Marcos's nearly 3,000 pair of shoes seem trifling.
The symbols of wealth have not made her literally richer, she said, but "I feel richer in self-esteem".
