[whalabi]

That does indeed appear to be the core problem in societies in this and the last century (and before, presumably.)

I'd argue that social democracy seems to be doing pretty well at distributing income and wealth and power. It's a shame "social" is a dirty word in the states.

If the EU can develop successfully over the next few decades into something superpower-like, maybe the benefits of such a system will become attractive to other powers and the ideas will spread.

Or maybe the China system of repression and threatening the neighbourhood will turn out to be more competitive globally and we'll see more of that.

And pardon the absurd typos in my last comment, my phone's keyboard is pretty terrible. I'd fix them but HN doesn't allow edits after a certain amount of time so the gibberish must remain.