Having registered this website on the Blog Action Day, I’ll try to write here some notes about poverty.
A few months ago, Professor Herman Daly wrote Towards A Steady-State Economy (an article published on “The Oil Drum”): one of its very observant passages was
What is the proper range of inequality — one that rewards real differences and contributions rather than just multiplying privilege? Plato thought it was a factor of four. Universities, civil services and the military seem to manage with a factor of ten to twenty. In the US corporate sector it is over 500.
Regardless of the fact that nowadays, as far as I know, there still isn’t any formal work on the ,teady-State Economy and, more or less, it’s like talking about economy before the Adam Smith age; in the long run we don’t have many cards to play: Olduvai (which, sadly, could be a way to solve the problem) or the Steady-State, which could be – on the other hand – a viable way to reply to what thermodynamics accounts for.
