The highest level of inequality is in Russia. The gap between rich and poor in the world continues to grow Inequality between rich and poor countries

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has ranked its members according to the gap between rich and poor. The authors of the study “Together: Why less inequality is better for everyone” believe that inequality between rich and poor not only reduces the social sustainability of society, but also slows down economic development. Among the 34 OECD members, inequality in income and living standards in 1985-2005 “robbed” 4.7% of economic growth.

It is also noteworthy that inequality tends to increase. Moreover, not only during periods of prosperity, but also during crises, as now. The rich layer of the population takes all the advantages economic growth. Over the past two decades, 40% of OECD residents have made next to nothing from the economic boom.

The main reason for the deterioration of the situation, according to the OECD, is the situation in the labor market. Almost one in three workers in OECD countries now work part-time.

The USA ranks 4th on the blacklist. The gap between rich and poor is greater in Chile, Mexico and Turkey than in America. The top ten most unequal countries also included Israel, the UK, Greece, Estonia (7), Portugal and Japan.

At the opposite pole are Denmark, Slovenia, Slovakia and Norway. In these countries, income inequality between rich and poor is the smallest.

In the 1980s, the income gap between the richest 10% and the poorest 10% of citizens in the OECD was 7, and in the 2000s it was 9. Now it has grown to 9.6. In America, the gap is twice as large – 18.8 (15.1 – 2007). For comparison: in France this figure is 7.4; in Germany – 6.6, and in Sweden – 5.8. Russia is not included in the ranking (it is not part of the OECD), but our level of income inequality is approximately the same as in the United States.

“We have reached a critical point,” says Secretary General OECD Angel Gurria.- Inequality in OECD countries is at its highest level since records began. All indications are that high inequality has a negative impact on economic growth. Action is needed. Moreover, not only for social reasons, but also for economic ones.”

The ten OECD countries with the highest levels of income inequality are:

2. Mexico

5. Israel

6. UK

8. Estonia

9. Portugal

A few days ago, two noteworthy annual documents were published. These are the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the Global Wealth Report 2018. The first, as you might guess from the name, is a kind of census of dollar billionaires from Bloomberg, the second is a report on world wealth from the largest Swiss bank Credit Suisse. Analysts from both companies agree on one thing: life has become better for Russian billionaires, life has become more fun. “Bloomberg” called a brief overview of its index: “What sanctions? Russia's rich turned out to be the main winners of the year."

Indeed, the 10 richest people in Russia increased their capital by 10.8% over the year - first place in the world. Their American counterparts got richer by only 7.5%, their British counterparts by 3.4%. Oligarchs in nine other countries included in this part of the study lost part of their capital. The fate of the Chinese rich is especially tragic: minus 27.6%! It seems that the construction of capitalism under the leadership Communist Party still has its own characteristics...

The question arises how much you can trust the statistics from Bloomberg and Credit Suisse. They have no special reasons to love Russia, but the figures given do not look like some kind of denigration; they do not diverge too much from Rosstat data and common sense.

Mikhelson, Mordashov and others

In total, Bloomberg counted 24 dollar billionaires in Russia who were in the world top 500: the ticket there is a capital of $3.75 billion. The leader among them is Leonid Mikhelson - over the year he added $4.06 billion to his fortune. This is three times more than the budget revenue of his native Dagestan, where almost three million people live. Leonid Viktorovich owns the Novatek holding and finances the activities of the notorious National Research University Higher School of Economics, the think tank of the Russian liberal lobby. His fortune exceeded $20 billion, which allowed Mikhelson to take 37th place in the world.

L. Mikhelson. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

And 38th is occupied by his old acquaintance Alexey Mordashov (Severstal, Power Machines). His assets came under American sanctions in 2018, so Alexey Alexandrovich earned only 147 million. He is only 200 million short of 20 billion - it’s a gain.

Third place in Russia and 40th in the world - Vladimir Lisin (Novolipetsk Iron and Steel Works). +1.39 billion, total wealth - 19.4 billion.

Also in the top hundred of the world's richest people are Vladimir Potanin, Vagit Alekperov, Andrey Melnichenko, Gennady Timchenko, Alisher Usmanov, Roman Abramovich, Viktor Vekselberg and Mikhail Fridman. Some of them have a very indirect relationship with Russia, but this is where they earn money. In total, there are 74 dollar billionaires in our country, adds Credit Swisse.

Bloomberg cites rising oil prices as the reason for the rapid growth in the wealth of Russian oligarchs, and we will add here active assistance from the state to sanctioned enterprises. After all, two of the three main rich people in Russia work not in the oil and gas market, but in the metallurgical market.

Between Gates and Mordashov

Counting capital is a tricky business. Money is money, assets are different. Take, say, the notorious Bill Gates. Second place in the world (after Jeff Bezos, Amazon), 95.5 billion. The bulk of the assets are Microsoft shares; Gates controls about 7.5% of the company. Can he “go to cash”, sell shares and see almost 100 billion in his account? Theoretically, yes, but in practice there is no buyer with such capital now in sight, and the release of such a large stake on the open market will inevitably lead to a collapse in Microsoft shares. So you will have to sell at a discount. But overall, Bill Gates does have a liquid asset on his hands.

But, let’s say, Alexey Mordashov, “the best speaker in the global steel industry.” It is believed that he owns 77% of Severstal, whose capitalization, according to Moscow Exchange rates, is $13.5 billion. Can it "cache"? Almost definitely - no. Severstal, of course, is not a suitcase without a handle, it generates profit, but in the regime of sanctions and the peculiarities of Russian business, it is a very toxic asset for which it is very difficult to find a buyer: the list of possible candidates is extremely limited, and these are mainly state corporations. A person “from the street” who is not close to the Kremlin simply cannot run this business. And the sale of shares on the stock exchange will lead to a significant reduction in their value: speculators are very sensitive to fluctuations in the Russian market. And 77% is not 7.5%: a completely different impact on capitalization.

A. Mordashov. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

Concentrate of Wealth

As for the Credit Swisse report (and on which it is based), the country of banks and cheese is focused on the concentration of global wealth. They calculated that the richest 10% of Russians own 82% of the country's total private wealth. Just a year ago, this figure was only 77%, that is, the concentration of capital continues to grow to some completely indecent proportions.

The Swiss confirm Bloomberg's conclusions regarding the situation in China: there, on the contrary, in just a year, the richest 10% have lost 10 percentage points - now they control 62% of the country's personal wealth, a year ago it was 72%. So we are “ahead of the rest” in this indicator.

Real incomes have broken through the crisis bottom

Are you rich?

Want to know if you are one of the 10% richest people in the world? Everything is very simple - $93,170 (6.15 million rubles) of personal wealth is a pass to this elite group. And $871,320 (57.5 million rubles) will bring you into the very narrow club of the 1% richest people in the world. It is believed that in the top 1% of the richest people in the world, 0.4% are Russians. In the top 5% - the same 0.4%. In the top 10% - 0.5%. The numbers, as we see, are quite even, and they are significantly lower than the percentage of Russians in general on the planet (1.93%). It is interesting to compare this with the Chinese figure. In the top 1% - 8.4% of the Chinese, in the top 5% - 10.8%, in the top 10% - 17.8%. The third figure already correlates with the share of Chinese citizens on the planet in general - 18.31%. But Norway has exactly the same shares among the richest as Russia, but there are many times fewer people there - 0.071% of the planet's population.

By the way, what is our wealth? Can we manage it, like Bill Gates, or are we limited in our capabilities, like Alexey Mordashov? Alas, it's more likely the latter. The financial assets of Russian citizens are almost three times smaller than non-financial ones - first of all, of course, real estate, our small but so expensive apartments. In China, non-financial assets exceed financial assets by only one and a half times. And, say, in the Netherlands, on the contrary, the average resident has almost 200 thousand dollars in his account and “only” 90 thousand in non-financial assets.

Fewer billionaires, more millionaires!

It is interesting that Swiss bankers estimate the number of Russian residents at less than 144 million people - almost 3 million less than according to Rosstat. At the same time, the number of dollar millionaires in Russia is 172 thousand people, 30% more than a year earlier, but still somewhat less than in tiny Norway. But, returning to Bloomberg data, we completely destroy Norway in terms of the number of very rich people: 24 Russians and only 4 Norwegians made it into the top 500 (and the richest of them is in the middle of the fourth hundred). This clearly indicates the overconcentration of capital in Russia. It’s time to proclaim the slogan: “Fewer billionaires, more millionaires!”

Wealth and GDP

In general, the well-being of Russian citizens for the year from July 2017 to June 2018 grew quite significantly - by $300 billion, to $2.2 trillion. At the same time, this amount is only slightly more than the annual Country's GDP- 1.4 times. For comparison, in China and Germany, the population has almost 4 annual GDP of the country, in Great Britain more than 5, even in India - more than 2 GDP.

Photo: www.globallookpress.com

Mean and median

Our median wealth (that is, the amount that 50% of Russians each have more and less than) is $2,739, while the arithmetic mean is $19,997, 7.3 times more. This is a very, very big gap. In China, the average wealth is only three times the median. What is the result? GDP per capita in Russia is still higher than in China - 1.19 times. And the median wealth of a citizen there is 5.96 times greater than ours.

Dear referee, there is no point in opening a score. This is an obvious knockout, gentlemen. If there is a kingdom of victorious social injustice in the world, then we live in it.

Decile catastrophe

There is such a concept - the decile coefficient: how many times a certain indicator is greater for 10% of leaders than for 10% of outsiders. It is most often applied to personal income. One should not confuse income and condition, wealth, but these, you see, are related things. So, in Tsarist Russia, the center of inequality and oppression, the decile coefficient was approximately 6.5 (calculations by a professor at the Faculty of Sociology of St. Petersburg state university Boris Mironov). In a modern democratic country there are 17 equal opportunities.

Moreover, this was not the case just recently; we have achieved similar successes in less than thirty years. In 1989-90, when centrifugal processes in the Soviet Union became irreversible, we emerged from “damned socialism” literally without pants. Excluding, of course, those involved in the party and budget coffers - both of them disappeared into some vast pockets. People were more or less equal in their poverty - status in the Soviet Union consisted more in participation in benefits and “feeding troughs” than directly in personal wealth. And when the so-called communists began to lose power, many of them were left with practically nothing - albeit in Stalinist apartments with Polish furniture and Czech chandeliers.

And in a very short period by historical standards, we managed to build the most unfair economic system throughout the turbulent and troubled history of Russia. Distribution of enterprises into private hands and access to natural resources, distributed in the mid-1990s among “their” people, predetermined the vector of the country’s development for decades to come. National diasporas, which kept a low profile under the USSR, began to openly fight for their piece of the lean common pie, pushing others away from it, and first of all, the so-called titular nation. Retail and wholesale, construction, transport and, of course, the raw materials sector gradually came under the control of Azerbaijani, Dagestan, Tatar, Jewish, and Armenian groups. The country's natural, industrial and even human resources ended up in the hands of a narrow circle of clever crooks. The results can be seen in the Forbes and Bloomberg lists.

Taking into account all of the above, it no longer seems at all unfair that Presidential Aide Andrei Belousov’s demand for the owners of “factories, newspapers, ships” to share. Because the situation has gone too far.

This was recorded by RANEPA experts after analyzing Rosstat data. The coefficient, which shows the difference between the incomes of the richest 10% and the poorest 10%, increased in the first quarter of 2017 compared to the first quarter of 2015. If you look at the dynamics of the social gap over the years (data in the infographic), you can see that it is now significantly higher than it was in 2000. Meanwhile, there were twice as many people with incomes below the subsistence level then - 42.3 million versus 19.8 million in 2016. Why, given the successes in the fight against poverty, has it increased so much? and social inequality continues to grow?

Oil Pie

“According to our calculations, the level social inequality above, voiced by Rosstat, says scientific supervisor All-Russian Center for Living Standards, main researcher REU im. Plekhanov Vyacheslav Bobkov. — We compared the incomes of the least wealthy (with an average per capita income below 10 thousand rubles) and the most wealthy (with an income above 110 thousand rubles). As a result, we got a gap of 21 times. And analysts from the Swiss bank Credit Suisse, in addition to income, took into account real estate, capital in shares, etc. and found that the level of inequality in Russia is higher than in any other large economy peace.

The fact is that we have a distribution system of monetary resources in our country. Since 2000, due to high oil prices in the country, additional income has been generated. But this increase was distributed in favor of a group of highly wealthy citizens who had their own lobbyists in power. And the poor received a small portion, which allowed them to raise their standard of living, so the number of poor people in the country decreased. But the social gap between the incomes of the poor and the rich widened because the latter increased their wealth at a faster pace. Now that the economy is in crisis, resources have become scarcer. The rich, trying to maintain their position, begin to protect them more jealously and cut the share of the poor, so the income gap began to grow again.”

“Russia ranks 63rd in terms of budget expenditures per capita,” explains Director of the Center for Strategic Studies Mikhail Bocharov. — Our figure is $1,474 per person. For comparison: in China with a population of 1,374 million people this figure is $1,765, in Estonia — $6,981, and in Norway — $44,662. This means that pensions, social benefits, and public sector salaries are small. And every year, taking into account inflation (real, not official), their purchasing power becomes less and less, and the rich continue to get richer. Recently, information appeared in the media that one well-known company paid a bonus to board members of 1.5 billion rubles, that is, each of the 10 top managers received 150 million rubles, or 16 annual salaries of the President of the Russian Federation.”

Trim golden parachutes

“Yes, pensions are being indexed in the country, new social benefits are being introduced,” notes Vyacheslav Bobkov. “But the flywheel itself, launched by the distribution system, works in the interests of the financial oligarchy. Remember who received the most financial support during the crisis? Banks! Comprehensive reforms are needed to stop this flywheel.”

First, the wage policy must be changed. There has been talk about increasing the minimum wage to the subsistence level since 2000. But only recently a draft law equalizing these values ​​was submitted to the government. Officials say it will take several years to implement. As AiF has already written, it is necessary to deal with the gaps in salaries between ordinary workers and top managers in the same industry. To legally establish the magnitude of this difference not only in the public sector, but also in the commercial sector, as has been done in some countries of the world. Finally, it is necessary to curb the appetites of top managers of companies with state participation - with their multimillion-dollar bonuses and “golden parachutes”.

The second way to smooth out the difference in income between rich and poor is a progressive tax. “People with an income of up to 30 thousand rubles. per month, you can generally exempt from tax,” argues Mikhail Bocharov. “For incomes above this amount, introduce a progressive tax scale.” This scheme works in most countries of the world. For example, in France, household income up to 809 euros per month (50 thousand rubles) is not taxed, on income up to 140 thousand rubles. the tax is paid at a rate of 14%, further - more. The maximum rate is 41%. However, all attempts to introduce a progressive tax in Russia are met with sharp resistance. “Officials say that with its advent we will get an increase in gray wages. But we, according to Head of the Ministry of Finance A. Siluanov, the annual volume of gray salaries is already 10 trillion rubles. “Half of what is paid in white,” M. Bocharov is perplexed. “Maybe we need to find ways to bring the economy out of the shadows?”

About the shadow side Russian economy V. Bobkov also reminds: “When we talk about the difference in income, we take into account only legal earnings. But this is the tip of the iceberg. Taking into account the shadow corrupt distribution system (bribes, kickbacks, etc.), the gaps between rich and poor in Russia are even larger.”

I eat cabbage, and the boss eats meat. On average we eat cabbage rolls.

Folk wisdom

The world continues to increase its income. According to forecasts of international organizations, in 2018 the economy will grow by 3.1% (World Bank) or 3.8% (OECD), or even 3.9% (IMF). Does this mean that all countries, their residents and each of us personally are becoming richer? Definitely no: the well-being of representatives of the rich strata increases, but the majority of the poor remain poor. We will try to reveal various aspects of the growth of social inequality and per capita income in the world in 2018.

The increase in billionaire wealth exceeds the growth rate of the global economy

Forbes is a fascinating magazine that we turn to when we want to know the names of the world's richest people and the size of their wealth. His 2018 list features a record number 2208 billionaires from 72 countries and territories. This elite the group owns $9.1 trillion, up 18% from last year, Forbes notes.

So, the increase in the welfare of the richest people on the planet by 2018 was compared to 2017 18% . And according to the IMF forecast, the growth of the world economy in 2018 is 3,9% . Thus, the rate at which billionaires are getting rich exceeds the rate of economic growth in the world, which means that the rest of the economy is growing more slowly than the “hospital average.” .

10 richest and poorest countries in the world

Let's analyze the stratification of the world's countries into rich and poor. We will not take into account the total wealth that countries have (because there are very large, but very poor countries, whose gross domestic product(GDP) is greater than that of very small but rich countries), and the relationship between the wealth of each country and its population, that is GDP per capita.

Based on IMF statistics, we will compile Table 1, from which you can see how the composition and income of the richest and poorest countries in the world have changed over the past 10 years.

Table 1 - The richest and poorest countries in the world

in terms of GDP per capita

** – for 2018 the forecast is presented based on actual data for 5 months

If we assume that in each of the countries presented in Table 1 there is one average citizen, whose per capita GDP accounts for the corresponding volume, then we can estimate the average growth rates of population incomes for two groups of countries (the richest and the poorest), as well as the dynamics of these indicators (Table 2).

Table 2 - Characteristics of groups of the richest and poorest countries in the world

Per capita income growth in absolute terms (in thousands of US dollars) continues in 2018 for both rich and poor countries. But the ratio of average GDP per capita by group of countries (rich to poor), as well as the richest to the poorest country, increased in 2018. It says on the growing income gap between groups in rich and poor countries in 2018 .

What about our income inequality indexes?

Ukraine is modestly represented in the Forbes list in 2018 7 the country's richest billionaires with general condition $13.2 billion, about 13% of the country's annual GDP. Let's add to this group of hryvnia millionaires, of whom, according to the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine, by 2018 there were 4,063 people in the country with more than $1 billion in annual income.

As for the income inequality indices calculated by the World Bank, according to the latest study, Ukraine is indeed ahead of the rest. The value of the Ukrainian Gini index (about 25%) and the Palma coefficient (8.2%) is the best in Europe.

This begs a logical question: how is this possible? Experts explain this phenomenon by the high volume of the shadow economy and the low quality of per capita income statistics taken into account when calculating inequality indices. But optimists reassure: not everything is so bad, and we still have a chance to get into the club of countries with the lowest level of social inequality, just... from a different entrance. They say that we have our own, unique path of development, and if it doesn’t work out like everyone else, then we will definitely succeed in our own way.

People have always dreamed of justice. Outrage against inequality was one of the most important driving forces in the history of the twentieth century - without it, neither the Russian revolutions, nor the collapse of colonial empires, nor the growth of the middle class in Russia would have happened. developed countries. But has the world become fairer over the past century? And can we avoid deepening inequality in the 21st century?

There is no consensus in the scientific community on these issues, but a recent World Bank study clearly shows that inequality across the planet is declining.

Rich man, poor man...

Supporters of left-wing (in the sense of socialist) ideas are usually confident that the gap between rich and poor is deepening, acquiring simply catastrophic proportions. “We live in a society where inequality is striking, and in many cases becoming more and more glaring,” the famous Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who visited Moscow, convinced me.

There was nothing to cover up with - it is obvious that in Russia, compared to the USSR, the stratification of property has increased many times over. It is enough to compare Brezhnev’s car park with Abramovich’s yacht park or the apartments of Soviet functionaries with the palaces of current officials and top managers. In 2012, the incomes of the richest 10% and the poorest 10% of Russians differed by 17 times, and in Soviet times - by 4 times.

Post-Soviet Russia is a special case, but Western leftists have been talking about growing inequality since the time of Karl Marx, who predicted that capital would accumulate at one pole of society and poverty at the other. It is easy for the rich and his heirs to become even richer: capital brings much greater profit than any labor, and poor family not to put together initial capital - labor is worth too little. Therefore, the gap between rich and poor will only widen.

Anomalous 20th century

All the statistics of the century before last confirmed this logic. But the 20th century ruined it: revolutions and world wars reversed the trend towards increasing inequality. Giant fortunes were lost, colonialism collapsed, and in Western countries trade union movement and the redistribution of taxes in favor of the working class, and most importantly, the world has entered a phase of rapid economic growth in the face of a labor shortage and a technological breakthrough. As a result, in developed countries, the poorest segments of the population have emerged from poverty.

1.1 billion people around the world have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty since 1990. “Extreme poverty” is considered to be an income of less than $1.90 per person per day.

But, according to one of Marx’s most famous modern followers, economist Tom Piketty, this was only a “temporary anomaly”: since the 1970s, capitalism has returned to its “normal” development, when the average wealth of the richest is growing much faster than world economy generally.

The increase in economic inequality in recent decades has not been very noticeable because intermediate level life. But statistics confirm many of Piketty's conclusions. For example, the middle class in the United States is indeed eroding - a recent study by the Pew Research Center recorded that for the first time in the post-war period in the United States, citizens with average incomes made up less than half of the population - 49.7%, although back in 1971 there were 61%.

We are 99%!

Now the 62 richest people on the planet have the same assets as the entire poorest half of the population. And if you take 1% richest people, their wealth is approximately equal to the total wealth of the remaining 99%. "We are 99%!" - remember the most popular slogan “occupying”, the main Western protest movement recent years? This is exactly what he is talking about, and the main reason for the protest is outrage at inequality.

In his best-selling book Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty argues that the Western world is returning to “patrimonial capitalism” - a society with a closed class structure in which large capital can only be acquired through inheritance or a successful marriage. It is an oligarchic society in which a few families control most of the wealth. Is this really our future?

How life has changed

Before we judge the future, let's take another look at how inequality has changed throughout the 20th century. Just let’s look not at the amount of money, but at what this money can buy, because equality is, first of all, equality of opportunity.

For example, have we begun to eat more “equally”? At the beginning of the last century, these same 99% of the population could only afford meat on holidays, and often simply went hungry. Today we eat better than the kings of past eras: we buy fruits from warm countries or seafood located thousands of kilometers away. The rich prefer expensive farm shops and "organic" food - the same thing by and large. Even in Soviet society, the gap between the nomenklatura, which fed on shortages, and the people, who dreamed of sausage, was much stronger.

767 million people are still in extreme poverty. More than half of them live in sub-Saharan Africa, and another third live in South Asia.

Has inequality in access to education increased? At the beginning of the last century higher education was a huge value that only a few could afford. Now this is the norm, not to mention secondary education and universal literacy. Moreover, right now a real revolution is taking place in this area: online education allows billions of people to listen to lectures in best universities peace - if there is a desire.

What about access to medicine? This is where inequality was clearly bound to increase: modern medicine is an expensive service. But no, statistics show the opposite: the difference in infant mortality or overall life expectancy is only decreasing all the time.

Perhaps the inequality of people before the law has increased? Nothing of the kind: women received voting rights, gays were no longer imprisoned, racial and national segregation was being successfully fought, even children’s rights were beginning to be protected.

Roughly the same thing happens in other areas. Piketty prophesies “patrimonial capitalism,” and yet it has never been so easy to get rich as it is now - simply by organizing needed by people startup, without any initial capital. There have never been such reliable social elevators that allow a capable person of any background to become a manager or official. The opportunity to travel and choose a place of residence has also always been a privilege of the elite, yet two thirds of the residents of today's Moscow were not born in it.

The end of poverty

It turns out that, according to statistics, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a select few and inequality is growing, but in reality everything is different?

No, the statistics will also change if we take into account not only Western countries, and the whole world, most of which lives much more modestly than you and me, but much better than their parents. Recently World Bank published a report on the results of a study of global wealth inequality. The conclusion is clear: inequality has been declining for many decades.

80% of the extremely poor live in rural areas

Yes, the incomes of the rich are growing faster than the economy as a whole. But the incomes of the poorest part of the population are growing even faster. Inequality is falling thanks primarily to unprecedented progress in the fight against poverty, from which more than a billion people have been lifted over the past quarter century.

For example, in India, in 2009-2010 alone, the number of poor people surviving on less than $1.9 a day decreased by one and a half times. In China, yesterday's semi-impoverished rural population is moving en masse into the category of wealthy city dwellers, the middle class. And there are more people living in these two states alone than in all of them. Western world. However, according to the World Bank, inequality continues to decline in most developed countries.

What's next?

So inequality is decreasing. Over a long period of time, this is easy to notice, but over a short period, the opposite trend may prevail - as in the USA and Russia.

Inequality, however, is not always evil; it is an important driving force social development. The idea of ​​equality underlies all social utopias, but when they tried to implement them, it turned out every time that complete equality was worse than any inequality. Pitirim Sorokin, a major sociologist of Russian origin, argued that the level of economic inequality fluctuates around an optimal value, too much deviation from which in any direction is fraught with disaster.

Apparently, the peak of inequality occurs at the agrarian stage of development of society, at one pole of which there is an all-powerful monarch and a brilliant aristocracy, and at the other - powerless slaves and serfs.

Does progress threaten equality? Perhaps. And it is connected, as many experts believe, with the growing technological gap between countries. Some states create new technologies and become richer. Others do menial work for them, the demand for which will fall as production becomes more automated. And still others cannot benefit from the fruits of progress at all. A similar gap may arise within the country - between the future-oriented center and the periphery, living out its days in the cozy world of traditions.

And yet, in the information society, judging by current trends, inequality will decrease. According to the famous economist Jeremy Rifkin and other ideologists of the sharing economy, the development of the Internet and smart automated services will launch a transition from an economy based on the extraction of surplus value to an economy of cooperation and exchange of goods.

The new sociality, which is replacing the atomization of society, is based on this: people will take more care of each other and together organize the life of their community. And an economy based on social principles, will be aimed not so much at increasing profits, but at improving the quality of our lives.