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It's not an issue of maintaining a 'western European' standard of living - it's an issue of millions of people suffering because of lack of access to basic serv

It's not an issue of maintaining a 'western European' standard of living - it's an issue of millions of people suffering because of lack of access to basic services, and a sky high crime rate that brutalises the population. The situation can be much better than it is without being comparable to western European standards. According to worldbank data the murder rate in SA is around 10 times higher than in Egypt, and around 5 times as high as in Mongolia. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=ZA https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=EG https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=MN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location... If you like the correct framing is 'extreme suffering due to poverty', not 'high inequality'. The inequality is galling because there is a small percentage of people (myself included) who enjoy a good quality of life while millions of people live in poverty. Purely in terms of 'inequality being bad', there are good reasons to believe that it undermines democracy (citation required I suppose).

avar 4y ago
I was mainly commenting on the parts of your post that dealt with government disfunction, corruption etc. Framing the murder rate as suffering "due to poverty" in the context of South Africa doesn't pass the sniff test. Indonesia's GDP PPP is similar to SA's, but it's safer than some western European countries in terms of murder rate. Closer to home, Namibia has compatible income inequality, but around a third of the murder rate. In South Africa around 70% of murder victims knew the perpetrator [1]. It seems safe to assume that most of that's within a similar income bracket. Just that statistic seems to discount some wider societal forces as the primary driver. 1. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/what-do-we-know-about-murder-in-south-africa https://issafrica.org/iss-today/what-do-we-know-about-murder...

avar 4y ago

I was mainly commenting on the parts of your post that dealt with government disfunction, corruption etc. Framing the murder rate as suffering "due to poverty" in the context of South Africa doesn't pass the sniff test. Indonesia's GDP PPP is similar to SA's, but it's safer than some western European countries in terms of murder rate. Closer to home, Namibia has compatible income inequality, but around a third of the murder rate. In South Africa around 70% of murder victims knew the perpetrator [1]. It seems safe to assume that most of that's within a similar income bracket. Just that statistic seems to discount some wider societal forces as the primary driver. 1. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/what-do-we-know-about-murder-in-south-africa https://issafrica.org/iss-today/what-do-we-know-about-murder...