Blog #3: Davos 2012: Income Inequality Becomes An Issue At World Economic Forum For First Time

               At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this year, instead of the rising debt in Europe being the main issue, the growing inequality was brought up for the first time.  Despite the Europe's latest attempts to fix their economy, their fear for a downfall.  They had no answers to the widening inequality gap, but came to a realization that economic growth must include the poor, that job creation is critical, and that affordable food, housing, health care and education need to part of any solution. Asia is proposed to be the leader in economic growth.  Vikram Pandit, CEO of the global bank Citigroup Inc, said that the number one priority should be getting people jobs.  He ways the world needs 40 million jobs not including the 200 million just to get back to full employment. They had protesters set up outside, yelling they were poor because of them.  "Unilever's Polman said it's unacceptable that more than 1 billion people are hungry every day while another billion are obese."  Nobel economics laureate Peter Diamond, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that their is an unemployment crisis, especially among young experienced people and that they need to work on better education system as well as other things. Among others things discussed at the Forum, the environment seemed to be more included than in a separate topic.  Nature is a support system and should be a part of the solution.
                Its good to see that other places are starting to realize the inequality that is growing all over.  This forum apparently has talked about the same things over and over again and now they realize there is a major problem that needs to be fixed.  Like the protesters many of the poor believe its the riches fault they are poor.  We talked about this in class, reasons countries are poor are because richer countries make them that way.  This Forum may not have been as upbeat as they usually are, but they took in to concern some major issues that are uprising. Every person who spoke had great ideas, they just need to find a way to implement them.

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/29/davos-2012-income-inequality_n_1240158.html