Singer

I was rather interested to note that Singer totally dismisses inequality in incomes as a non-problem. Last term, I was in Prof. Eastwood's Social Revolutions class, where a couple of the points we discussed time after time was the domestic political instability rooted in classes with inequal incomes. Revolutions like the Glorious Revolution, the French Revolution the Russian Revolution, and even to an extent the Iranian Revolution of '79 came after relative periods of economic prosperity (though the policies the Pahlavi Shahs put forward in Iran came at the cost of an unstable, externalities-dependent economy) where income brackets may have even begun moving closer together. While Singer was undoubtably thinking of incomes moving apart, this too plays a role; "economic crisis" is one of the precipitating factors in several theories of revolution. Incomes previously moving closer together move apart... And something like envy rears its green-eyed head. While this doesn't cause revolutions, it is a contributing factor.