Equality Fuels Democracy: Wealth, Prosperity, and Social Mobility #shorts

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]No, it was almost the opposite. So, historically, democracies have I mean, there've been different phases, right?

[00:00:06]So, I don't want to over-generalize, but certainly in the 20th second half of the 20th century, the democracies since the Second World War have tended towards equality, and including in the United States. And at their most successful and prosperous moments, people there was if there was much less wealth equality than inequality than there is now. And the countries we were talking about earlier, the happy countries, those are relatively equal countries, and those are countries with good welfare states, and a lot of redistribution of wealth.

[00:00:34]And those are countries where people feel invested in the system, partly because they don't feel completely outclassed by a group of oligarchs. If you look at the United States in the 1950s, that was a period of also huge social mobility, when lower middle class, middle class people began to get wealthier, and there's this enormous wave of prosperity, and that's a period when everybody is becoming wealthier.

[00:00:54]And that was also a period when you have the, you know, very successful American democracy, you have the civil rights movement, you have democracy beginning to spread to new populations, or to people who'd been excluded before. So, you have a a connection between equality and democracy, uh wealth, even wealth equality.