This is factually incorrect.
I write from the perspective of a Briton who's watched "austerity politics" lay waste to this country.
Thanks to the gradual increase of poverty, we've seen a soaring rise in food banks (
Revealed: record number of households in UK depending on food banks), a drop in life expectancy since 2010 (which is when the Conservative government came in and started pushing for "austerity";
Life expectancy falling in parts of England before pandemic - study - note also the huge difference between life expectancy for men in the richest area in London, Chelsea, at 95.3 years, and life expectancy in one of the poorest regions, 68.3 years), and a ridiculous rise in the incidence of diseases associated with poverty and malnutrition like rickets and scurvy (
Huge rise in ‘Victorian diseases’ like rickets, scurvy and gout across UK), with newspapers widely referring to them as "Victorian diseases" due to the fact they'd not really been seen in England outside of Dickens novels since the turn of the century.
Unsurprisingly, this is connected to a massive increase in income inequality (
North-south wealth inequality in England on course to grow, report finds); things have reached the point now where for younger generations, it is becoming nigh-impossible to earn your way up the social mobility ladder via actual work, and instead social mobility is tied to inheritance; things are getting so bad that even the deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies has been quoted as saying “The fact that we can no longer be sure that the young will grow up with living standards that match [those of] their predecessors is a remarkable social change” (
Rising asset wealth and falling real wages ‘drive inequality in Britain’).
This lack of financial stability and economic future has wider social concerns, too; birth rates in the UK are now the lowest they've been in two decades (
Birthrate in England and Wales drops to lowest level in two decades) as young people not only have less "disposable income" to afford having children, but also often don't have the space due to rising housing costs relative to their income (
More homes, more babies? Why Britain's falling birth rate needs a housing fix).
There's also the issue of how money moves around the economy; the idea of "trickle down economics" is often touted, but never comes good. Most studies have shown the opposite to be true; "according to research from the Brookings Institution and the Reserve Bank of Australia, the marginal propensity to consume of high-income earners is substantially less than for low-income earners. In other words, poorer people are likely to spend the bulk of any extra income while the wealthy are more likely to save it." (
Economic growth more likely when wealth distributed to poor instead of rich)
So while no one's saying you should be earning the same as Elon Musk, the data all seems to point to the fact that as the
Gini Coefficient increases, the more unhealthy the populace, the society, and the economy is.
www.motorola.com
