Huge levels of inequality do not have to lead to unpleasantness and civil strife

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If it works for Namibia, why can't it work for us? Why do we always assume that rising inequality will lead to civil strife and therefore we must keep feeding our indigent and lazy? Seems to me they could learn a thing or two from the example of their fellow poor people in Namibia.

Namibia ... is one of Africa’s political and economic successes: a middle-income developing country with rich natural resources, good infrastructure, gorgeous landscapes, a stable and democratic government, harmonious race relations, a free press and an economy that has grown on average by 4.2% a year since independence in 1990.

With a population of just 2.2m rattling around in a country one-and-a-half times the size of France, the former German colony of South West Africa is one of only nine African countries classified as free by Freedom House. In that Washington-based think-tank’s most recent “Freedom in the World” survey, it gets the second-highest mark (2 out of 7) for both political rights and civil liberties. In the latest index of good governance in Africa published in London by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, it comes sixth out of 53 countries.

Yet the UN Development Programme suggests that, by some calculations, Namibia is the world’s most unequal nation. Go to the capital, Windhoek, or Swakopmund, the main sea resort, and you could be forgiven for believing you were in a rich little European town: neat, well-paved streets lined by elegant high-rise hotels and banks, smart boutiques, outdoor cafés and pretty little homes painted in the colours of the Namib desert—ochre, pale yellow, salmon pink. But drive a bit further out and you find overcrowded black townships and beyond them the sprawling shanty towns where the dirt-poor live in leaky corrugated-iron shacks with no electricity, running water or sanitation.

[Zero Sum 305]

I hear its absolutely a gorgeous destination. As to the inequalities, I guess all that is needed is one natural disaster to swell up the drive of economic necessity in the poorest. Then we'll see how quaint things remain.