Trump’s success highlights growing power of income inequality
■ I should like to add to Anthony Woods’s clear-headed critique of what he refers to as ‘trickle-down economics’ (Irish Independent, Letters, October 15).
There is too much asked of economists. Economic predictions are more akin to a flutter at the races than to a securely grounded proposition that one finds, for example, in physics or chemistry.
Too often, and too easily, we fall foul of the assumption that economics is a science, and that only the foolhardy resist its deliverances.
The fact that economic theory legitimises poverty and unfettered competition in the creation of wealth is drowned out by the dubious claim that, in the drive to achieve wealth, prosperity and opportunity for all, a measure of poverty is unavoidable.
Economic thinking, as we know it, is driven by a particular view of human nature, a view that assumes that competition will always trump collaboration in the effective creation of wealth.
The fact that the world’s richest 1pc accumulates more wealth than the remaining 99pc fuels the suspicion that economic theory and practice is based on a questionable ideological bias, favouring those already wealthy. Economists seem to have set up camp in a world of their own making, where poverty is seen as a small price to pay for economic success, evading the moral demand that government economic initiatives should work equally to the advantage of all.
Additionally, there is a growing awareness that our way of life is being steadily undermined by the injustice of income inequality, with the consequent concentration of power in the hands of a few. This was brought home to us in the US, in the election of the ludicrously unlikely Donald Trump to the most powerful position in the world, few being in a position to marshal the financial support required to fund an election campaign.
Philip O’Neill Oxford, UK