Plutocracy is also characterized by suborning of national institutions. This has enormous implications for policy design, especially when the Reserve Bank of India has selected CPI as its chosen benchmark for inflation targeting. Nachane and Aditi Chaubal (goo.gl/gxLcwd) finds a plutocratic bias in the way India’s consumer price index (CPI) is constructed, by attaching greater weightage to items of expenditure consumed by higher income groups. An Oxfam 2017 report showed that 57 Indian billionaires own as much as the bottom 70% of the population.Īnother paper by Dilip M. Increasing wealth concentration among the rich is corroborated by Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2016: India’s top 1%, which owned 36.8% of the country’s wealth in 2000, now owns close to 58% of the wealth (the global average is 50%). While the authors avoid offering any conclusions about the impact of economic reforms on inequality or poverty in India, their findings point to an uncomfortable truth: Post the 1980s, when the process of economic reforms began, the top 1% in India have seen their incomes and wealth grow at a much faster rate than the balance 99%. Simultaneously, it also shows how the top 10% grew at a much faster rate than the average, while income growth of the balance 90% fell below average. Consequently, plutocracy eats away at the core of any democratic system.Ī recent paper by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty shows how India’s average real income growth accelerated post-2000. Plutocracy, in short, can be defined as rule by the wealthy and the powerful, where policies and systems are designed to deliver greater benefits to the wealthy and powerful. India has often been called a plutocracy for its manifest disposition towards the rich and the powerful. This data-driven book offers insight into the fallacy of widespread opportunity, the fate of the middle class, and the mechanisms that perpetuate income disparity.There is a name for this. Formisano surveys the widening circle of inequality’s effects, the exploitation of the poor and the middle class, and the new ways that predators take money out of Americans’ pockets while passive federal and state governments stand by. The United States now is more a plutocracy than a democracy. Since the 1970s, government policies have contributed to the flow of wealth to the top income strata. Formisano explores how the dramatic rise of income inequality over the past four decades has transformed America from a land of democratic promise into one of diminished opportunity. In this tough-minded dissection of the gulf between the super-rich and the working and middle classes, Ronald P. A government dominated by finance, corporate interests, and the wealthy has undermined democracy, stunted social mobility, and changed the character of the nation. This book reveals that an infrastructure of inequality, both open and hidden, obstructs the great majority in pursuing happiness, living healthy lives, and exercising basic rights. A hard-hitting analysis of how the disparity between wealth and poverty undermines the common good.The growing gap between the most affluent Americans and the rest of society is changing the country into one defined-more than almost any other developed nation-by exceptional inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity.
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