Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, August 12, 2011

Wealth distribution and politics

The distribution of income and wealth in a country is often looked at a determinant of political and governmental actions. The GINI index is one of several measures of income distribution. The distribution of wealth within most countries is more unequal than the distribution of income, but inequalities are often seen as factors that put stresses on political and national unity.

Iran is not the only country where inequalities are growing and seen as political problems. As a political issue, appearance is as important as reality, and the history of inequalities is also important.

The Washington Post headline writer did not distort Thomas Erdbrink's slant on the issue in Iran.

Iran’s rich eat ice cream covered in gold as poor struggle to survive

Gold-flecked ice cream wasn’t part of the picture that Shiite Muslim clerics painted during the Iranian Revolution, when they promised to lift the poor by distributing the country’s vast oil income equally across society.

But more than three decades later, record oil profits have brought in billions of dollars, and some people here are enjoying that decadent dessert. The trouble is, it’s just a small group of wealthy Iranians. Despite the promises of the revolution, many here say the gap between rich and poor has never seemed bigger.

Iran’s new wealthy class has succeeded in tapping the opportunities provided by a vast domestic market, sometimes aided by corruption and erratic government policies. It includes children of people with close connections to some of Iran’s rulers, as well as families of factory owners and those who managed to get huge loans from state banks at low interest rates…

People are writing open letters complaining about the rise in inequality. Influential conservative blogger Amir Hossein Sabeti wrote last month that the shift in the way Iranians conduct themselves in public, increasingly ignoring the soberness that the revolution prescribed, is a bigger threat to Iran’s ideology than the United States or Israel…

The popular resentment over inequality has a strong political dimension in Iran. During his two election campaigns, Ahmadinejad attacked a group of influential clerics connected to former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, accusing them of using their positions to accumulate vast wealth. But some of his closest aides are also accused of corruption…

Hossein Raghfar, an economist who recently quit his post as an adviser to Ahmadinejad’s government… stressed that, particularly in a society so strongly based on ideology, perception matters a lot. Reports that about 2.5 million children are working rather than attending school, and even an increase in legal kidney sales — along with a recent price drop, from $10,000 to $2,000, because so many people are selling their organs for cash — give people the clear idea that they are sliding into poverty, he said…

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Labels: demographics, economics, Iran, politics