Equality is not a virtue and it hurts the economy, inequality is a resource: the theoretical hardware of the neo-liberalist ideology dismantled piece by piece.

In the last quarter of a century – from the 1980s onwards – the dominant dogma among the world’s leaders has been that a certain degree of inequality is necessary to guarantee a high rate of economic development, while the egalitarian policies that were adopted after the second world war have been accused of being a grave handicap for the economy and a dangerous ‘moral hazard’. It was this dogma – supported by pseudo-scientific arguments, almost a kind of theory complete with algorithms and Cartesian graphs – that fuelled the neo-liberal policies which, from the United States of Ronald Regan to Thatcherism in the United Kingdom, ended up influencing the economic policies of the entire Western hemisphere. Among the prevailing rhetorical devices of what, with good reason, has been called ‘groupthink’ was the assumption based on the so-called ‘trickle-down’ theory, according to which a concentration of wealth ‘on high’, in the most fortunate (or privileged) sectors of society would, in time, ‘percolate’ through to the lower levels to the benefit of all. The same template was also applied to the environment, with the affirmation that a high initial level of pollution in the ‘take-off’ phase would be acceptable because this would be subsequently reabsorbed by the growth in wellbeing and improvement in technologies. Both of these theses have been emphatically contradicted by the facts: inequalities have continued to grow exponentially across the world, both in terms of relationships between countries and within individual territories. And the imbalances determined by this inverted out-and-out ‘class struggle’ – waged from the top down – have created the conditions for the current severe global economic crisis even as the planet’s environmental conditions continue to deteriorate.