Donald Trump and Angela Merkel will join 2,500 world leaders, business executives and charity bosses at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland which kicks off on 23 January. High on the agenda once again will be the topic of inequality, and how to reduce the widening gap between the rich and the rest around the world.
The WEF recently warned that the global economy is at risk of another crisis, and that automation and digitalisation are likely to suppress employment and wages for most while boosting wealth at the very top.
But what ideas should the great and good gathered in the Swiss Alps be putting into action? We'd like to know what single step you think governments should prioritise in order to best address the problem of rising inequality. Below we've outlined seven proposals that are most often championed as necessary to tackle the issue – but which of them is most important to you?
- Provide free and high quality education
- Raise the minimum wage
- Raise taxes on the rich
- Fight corruption
- Provide more social protection for the poor
- Stop the influence of the rich on politicians
- Provide jobs for the unemployed
Do you think these ideas are enough, or are there any better ideas to close this wealth gap ? You too can participate and vote for the idea that, you think, works best.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @08:53AM
Fixed. Don't equate schooling with education. You can receive an education from a school, but the quality of it will almost certainly be abysmal since most of our schools are abysmal. You have people graduating from colleges with Computer Science degrees who can't even write a FizzBuzz program. You have people - in this case, I would say the overwhelming majority - graduating from high schools who don't understand why any of the math equations they memorized (assuming they even still remember them, which they usually don't) even work. Don't buy into the propaganda that schooling equals education, or that someone with more schooling than someone else is necessarily more educated or more 'deserving' of a job. A motivated person can, in the vast majority of cases, attain an education with or without schooling.
We live in an age where nearly every job is starting to require that people have a piece of paper, and that harms not only education, but results in unqualified employees being hired while qualified people are overlooked.