You need protection, non corruption and a level of equality to be protected by that rule of law.
I think that is what mostly has been eroded - also the poorest 10% need a reason to believe in rule of law.
The others don't matter if it's lacking, because social contracts without contracts meaning anything are worthless.
As far as the poorest 10%, though: There is always a poorest 10%. And a poorest 50%. If you're in the middle class or higher, you have every reason to prevent the poor from revolting and taking what you have. This can be accomplished by a vast array of carrots and sticks. Some countries lean more toward the carrot - we call them liberal democracies. Autocratic states use the stick.
But although greater wealth inequality may be a good indicator of the tendency of the lowest 10% to become lawless, it is not a good indicator of which method is used to keep them in check. Cuba has pretty amazingly low levels of wealth inequality - essentially everyone's poor. Keeping them from rebelling, however, is all stick, precisely because any kind of economic carrot would undermine the philosophy that it's better for everyone to be poor than to have wealth inequality.
For the most part, the bottom 10% in most liberal democracies are much better off than most people in most autocratic states.
Wealth inequality isn't great but the existence of wealthy people in successful countries helps fund service for the entire population. Yet I saw a poster the other day titled "class warfare" with a picture of graveyard saying that's where the "rich" will be buried. People don't understand at all how counties and economies work and how this system we live in works vs. the alternatives (I'm in Canada btw).
I don’t know where you can even think the bottom 10% of the west/liberal democracies are better than “most” in those other countries. That’s a wild thing to think. Seems like typical western centrism and chauvinism.
I think it does the opposite. Those services were mostly built during the last century after the war when conditions were just right for people to get those policies implemented. Since then the wealthy have mostly been lobbying against those services, dodging taxes, spreading propaganda justifying the inequality, etc. Now we're seeing the results of this work by the wealthy.
I also think it's wrong to assume the wealthy are the creators of that wealth just because they have it. It can also be the result of using positions of power to get a larger share of a pie baked by a lot of people.
The top 1% of highest income in Canada pays 21-22% of the taxes. Their share of the income is about 10%. So they "rich" are paying for services everyone else is getting.
The top 10% pay 54% (!) of the taxes. Their share of income is about 34%.
The top 0.1% pays about 8-9% of the taxes.
So in Canada the rich are absolutely paying for the services everyone else gets. That's before accounting for their indirect contributions to the economy by running businesses, employing people, taxes paid by companies, etc.
Maybe some random billionaire has some scheme that reduces their taxes. But most of the the rich pay way more taxes than others.
The average income in Egypt is ~$1900 USD a year (it's probably worse now but this is a number I've seen). Low income threshold in Canada is about $20k (EDIT: CAD) a year and that's about the bottom 10%.
So not sure what your point is re: wild thing to think. Do you think the average Egyptian is better off than the low 10% Canadian?
How is it that because liberal democracies "control the world" that Egypt is forced to be an autocracy? Do they have no agency? If Liberal democracies so control the world how come some countries have been able to do better (China e.g.)
Maybe you need to give me more examples. Who are "actually wealthy" people in Canada who do not pay any taxes whatsoever and contribute nothing to the local economy/country? e.g. they avoid paying GST or HST, they avoid paying property taxes, they don't pay capital gains taxes?
I do agree that some rich people (and also not rich people) campaign for a smaller government and less taxes. I don't think that's an unreasonable position. There is a sweet spot for taxation and taxes in Canada are quite high. It's not a zero sum game (e.g. we have people leaving Canada to go to lower tax countries like the US).
It is clear that one rich person who leisurely spend their morning getting ready for a business meeting does not provide any care to any elderly.
Your comment is clear example of the type of misinformation that got us here.
In the end money is an institution. You can only get things done, I if someone are willing to take money for work. And that only works when there is a certain level og equality.
As a society we have a capacity to work, and we divide that work using money.
Your observation thst rich people pay for services is indicative of an oligarchy. When rich people pay, then it is not a plethora or small businesses, a democratic chooses government, or a consortium of investors bundling together to do something great.
You are literally pointing out the failure of the west.
In unequal societies governance is controlled by less people and they tend to divert money into activities that increase their wealth instead of benefitting everyone - this has in particular happened in the west over the past 40 years.
Everything I see around me, in data and anecdotally, tells me that in my unequal society (Canada) everyone is doing better and governance is not controlled by rich people. The current government that won the elections would not be the preferred government of the ultra rich who want to make a little more money on the backs of everything else (which honestly is not a thing as far I can tell).
Marianna Mazucato's writings look interesting but I'd have to dig in more. Rutger Bregman seems like much less of an expert in the domain and I'm not sure his ideas vibe with me but might take a look.
Oligarchy would be the rich controlling the countries in the west. Other than in people's imagination and conspiracies there is no evidence of that actually happening. Was Trump the favorite candidate of the rich in the US? I very much doubt it. Do the rich gain more influence with their money - sure. But not more influence then the rest of the population. The 99.9% have more influence than the 0.1% in aggregate.
The west is the only place on this planet where the corrupt rich do not have absolute control (see Putin). Is it perfect, no? Is it better than those failed attempts to make everyone equal, strong yes.
The top 0.1%, 1%, 10% are still a lot of people. This includes many successful small businesses, it includes large businesses, it includes many. Those people have varied opinions on how countries should be run, just like all of us. But they also have a vested interest in having a safe and free and well functioning society.
I don't know the particular situation for Canada, but I know that welfare benefits are getting worse in my country (France)
"The wealthy are hiding their wealth" sounds like a conspiracy theory. I think we have pretty good visibility into the really wealthy (e.g. we know pretty well who is on the short list of billionaires in Canada and more or less what they own). Banks report any movement of money >$10k, real estate is tracked, company ownership is tracked. That there is some large number of really wealthy people hiding in plain sight doesn't compute. We can't disprove the idea that some person living on the streets in East Vancouver is actually a billionaire hiding their wealth but even if so that percentage of those people in the total population isn't going to move the needle vs. all the known rich people who can't really "hide". If there are ways to legally not pay taxes then we'd hear about them and use them. Billionaires do have some options most of us can't pursue but I think the idea that the rich hide their wealth and don't pay taxes is mostly a myth. Prove me wrong...
Here's some data to try and support my claim:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/467384/percentage-of-pop...
The % of the population in low income families has been declining. Here's a broader time horizon:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/467276/number-of-persons...
We'd need to plot that against income/wealth inequality but I expect that has increased over this period.
This isn't consistent across Canada, for example in Alberta: https://www.statista.com/statistics/583120/low-income-popula...
There's virtually no movement since 1976 (the percentage is somewhat lower today).
I'm assuming the threshold for low income represents some more or less equal standard of living.
We can look at some other metrics like life expectancy:
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/can/can...
This has consistently improved since the 1950's which doesn't seem to support the theory that the broad population is doing worse.
If you think you have a better metric that shows that most people are worse off due to the increasing wealth/income gap then let's see it.
Random by the way is that I just saw an article today about the wealth distribution in Canada and the data point there was that the top percentiles wealth has declined since 2019. Obviously the top 0.1%/1%/10% still own a lot of the total wealth (I think the figure was something like 56% of the wealth in the top 10%) but that's what you'd expect in a free capitalist system.
( I think the article was related to this report: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/13-605-x/2025001/article... )
Another random by the way observation is that I think the ability of some random person to get ahead is probably unprecedented. Never has knowledge been so accessible (Internet) and various means of production be so accessible and cheap (content creators, apps, prototyping equipment, etc.).
Start a successful business, take some chances, and maybe you'll pay more tax. Heck- many software engineers are likely in the top 10% in Canada.
This is exactly how I would have responded to the above comment. I'd just add that there is tons of evidence for liberal democracies attempting to help or entice those countries to become less corrupt, more transparent and more democratic. Saying that countries that have been independent of colonial rule for a hundred years, which incidentally were mostly handed democratic systems, have become autocracies because of liberal democracies want them that way is sheer insanity.
Your point about agency should be the standard rebuttal to all forms of third-worldism that attempt to blame homegrown problems on external actors. But having someone external to blame for homegrown repression isn't just post-hoc rationalization. It actually serves to reinforce the oppression in those states, both as a pressure-release valve for autocrats, and the failure to evaluate internal problems serves as an underlying reason why they have not successfully overthrown those regimes and transitioned to democracy.
Mostly, though, that type of talk comes out of the mouths of Westerners who know nothing about the situation in, e.g. Egypt.
Your comment can be adjusted a bit and it would work for “do black men have no agency” contrasted with white people in a country like America. Or any number of other oppressive dynamics.
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This all ignores that Egypt’s current regime right now is propped up by America.