No seu mais recente artigo no New York Times, o economista Joseph Stiglitz (nobel da economia em 2001) descreve e avalia a situação económica mundial, comentando a experiência de vários países e espaços económicos quanto à evolução económica e a sua situação quanto à desigualdade. De que forma estão a evoluir as economias e como evolui a desigualdade entre as sociedades à medida que os países prosseguem rumo ao desenvolvimento económico? E o que se está a passar naqueles ditos desenvolvidos?
Vale a pena passar pela prosa de Stiglitz e refletir com ele lendo “The Great Divide – Inequality Is a Choice” (em inglês)
Deixamos aqui um dos excertos onde se refere a Europa e o remate final:
“The embrace of austerity, from Britain to Germany, is leading to high unemployment, falling wages and increasing inequality. Officials like Angela Merkel, the newly re-elected German chancellor, and Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, argue that Europe’s problems are a result of a bloated welfare spending. But that line of thinking has only taken Europe into recession (and even depression). That things may have bottomed out — that the recession may be “officially” over — is little comfort to the 27 million out of a job in the E.U. On both sides of the Atlantic, the austerity fanatics say, march on: these are the bitter pills that we need to take to achieve prosperity. But prosperity for whom?
(…) For these reasons, I see us entering a world divided not just between the haves and have-nots, but also between those countries that do nothing about it, and those that do. Some countries will be successful in creating shared prosperity — the only kind of prosperity that I believe is truly sustainable. Others will let inequality run amok. In these divided societies, the rich will hunker in gated communities, almost completely separated from the poor, whose lives will be almost unfathomable to them, and vice versa. I’ve visited societies that seem to have chosen this path. They are not places in which most of us would want to live, whether in their cloistered enclaves or their desperate shantytowns.”