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What makes for a peaceful society? Hot spots from Congo to the Middle East would benefit from such knowledge. But so would the United States, which, at home, isn’t always so harmonious and abroad, is still at war in Afghanistan.
The Institute for Economics and Peace, an international research group, has come up with eight ingredients for more peaceful societies. They’re laid out in a report, “Structures of Peace,” based on the institute’s annual Global Peace Index and more than 300 data sets from around the world. The US does pretty well on five of them, but falls far short on three key ingredients.
Michael Shank, vice president of the institute’s US office gives his take on eight ingredients America needs to reap the economic and social benefits of peace.
2. Distribution of resources
There is a “growing unequal” in America, to borrow a phrase from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Americans now have the highest poverty rate since WWII and the highest income inequality rate since the Great Depression. Data compiled recently by the Economic Policy Institute show that in the last 30 years, the top 1 percent doubled their incomes. Everybody else gained hardly anything.
It behooves the US to close its inequality gap because with it comes a host of social-health problems, whether those are high rates of homicide, incarceration, obesity, illness, addiction, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy and low social mobility and life expectancy – which cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Improving this situation requires making it easier for Americans to get ahead, get insured, get educated, and get a job. The current tax code benefits asset owners (e.g. low taxes for capital gains) much more than it benefits wage earners. A more fair and distributive tax system would help balance the inequitable scales.
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