I recently wrote an essay on the disparity of resources and wealth leading to a dystopian future. It was an exciting experience, not even because of the format itself, but, in fact, the theme. My initially simple thoughts and ideas for writing a text in the course of work turned into a whole set of related questions. Such metamorphoses of thought and structure influenced the text, its composition, and the overall tone, reflecting the problems of inequality. From the idea of ​​mothers with children oppressed by employers, I came to the global issues of neo-colonialism and academic emphases. It also affected the structure of the material, as well as its general direction. As a result, I gained the idea for the ​​work that revealed several topics and reconstructed a general broad problem.
An example of consideration of an element of a general theme is a historical retrospective of inequality. Interested in the issue of the historical context of the problem of inequality in society, I came across a number of observations and cases that exhibit the topic in more detail. The first observation that interested me was the most striking and obvious: inequality between different peoples. Having studied the issue in more detail, I found that the most vivid example of this kind of phenomenon is the European colonialism of modern times. The materials on the transatlantic slave trade, the exploitation of the peoples of Asia and Africa, and the atrocities of the Belgian crown in the Congo were vivid impressions. From the fiction that influenced my views on this topic, it is worth highlighting the book of Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad “Heart of Darkness.” The study of materials on colonialism resulted in a new look at global inequality and the exploitation of people by people.
It was also interesting to get acquainted with thinkers and scientists of the past and present. In addition to Marxist and general economic literature, works like “The price of inequality” by Stiglitz were interesting and helpful during the work. In his work, the author demonstrates the United States as being caught in a vicious circle of growing inequality among the population (Stiglitz, 2013), which was important in the context of my work. All this allowed me to see the problem from different points of view and form a more holistic picture since I consider impartiality an essential quality in my work. An attempt to impose my view on the issue of inequality would deprive my material of a scientific perspective, which is unacceptable in such a significant issue.
Summarizing all of the above, I can say that the work on inequality was considerably simple at first glance. However, starting to get acquainted with a variety of information related to the topic, I was faced with the diversity of manifestations of inequality at different levels of social structure, culture, and economy. This fact prompted me to explore as many points of view as possible about inequality, its manifestations, and origins. For this, the historical, political, and economic sources of both the past and the present were studied, which gave me a complete picture of what was happening. This approach, as well as the abundance of information, allowed me to understand the depth of the topic and write a paper covering the phenomenon of inequality in general.
Reference
Stiglitz, J. E. (2013). The price of inequality: How today’s divided society endangers our future (Reprint ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.