PHIL 237 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Simon Kuznets, Thomas Piketty, Thomas Robert Malthus

• School: McGill University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHIL 237
• Professor: Dominic Martin

Document Summary

There may be an issue with rising inequality in our society. These regimes of political economy were so good at stimulating economic growth and boosting societal wealth that they thought thy were being beneficial to everyone. Others brought to public awareness that these social achievements did not eliminate social inequality. Not only is this still a problem, but also it has now become a problem or rising inequality. As far as we can tell at this point, economic growth is causing an increase in economic inequality. This was big news when some economists (like piketty and atkinson) started to raise awareness about this fact around five years ago. A lot of people simply thought that this was not a real problem. The issue of equality is a very important one in this day and age. When we do applied ethics, we must use different theories of ethical thinking from different domains of the social sciences.