What the Gini Coefficient Means

How and why is there such a he gap between the Haves and Have Nots, which exacerbates inequality of lifestyle and wages and promotes a death spiral of the Have Nots by a very uneven playing field in education and healthcare? Without good paying jobs, poor educational opportunities and no healthcare, the poor find themselves in a very dark hole with no ladder to climb out. Faced with this, people go to the servile mode to survive and will do whatever to survive. It is the survival of the fittest, which is one step away from war. The money people who could change this just keep hording more money and depressing the proletariats more by trying to stop unions and taking away their voting rights with voter identification gimmicks. This attack on the workers here in the U.S. is the same thing going on all over the world. If the capitalist system is going to survive the 1 percent must make some changes and invest in using their cash to create manufacturing jobs and not just shifting paper from place to place. All this does is make the 1 percent richer, but does nothing else for anyone else except allows the 1 percent to hoard even more money while stifling the economy and driving the inequality of the world. Just look at the most used measures of income inequality it is called the Gini Coefficient. The “Gini index measures the extent to which the distribution of income or consumption expenditure among individuals or households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution. A Lorenz curve plots the cumulative percentages of total income received against the cumulative number of recipients, starting with the poorest individual or household. The Gini index measures the area between the Lorenz curve and a hypothetical line of absolute equality, expressed as a percentage of the maximum area under the line. Thus a Gini index of 0 represents perfect equality, while an index of 100 implies perfect inequality,” according to the World Bank. The CIA’s world fact book gives Gini Coefficient for 141 countries and it shows the Scandinavian countries do well as they have low inequality. The U.S. ranks 41st, meaning 41st from the bottom–yea America! We have fractionally more equality than Peru and Uruguay, but less than the Philippines, Cameroon, Guyana, Iran and many other countries. This needs to change and if it doesn’t the capitalist system as we know it today will change to a type of hybrid system or just go away. Then what good will all that money hording by the rich do for them? It might be very good for the Have Nots if nothing changes. We may soon find out.