Bridging the gap of rich and poor

Letters

KARL Max, the great thinker of all time, said that capitalism creates conditions or situations that promote inequality between the rich and the poor or more appropriately, between the capitalists and the working class.
Every day society is providing new challenges and people are reacting to those challenges for survival.
The challenges are many and different, depending on the kind of needs and wants people have.
For example, a working class family can afford to buy a doll and present it to their child as their birthday present whereas a family that is not earning a wage can look for something else that does not cost money to meet the need of the child.
Another example: If people are looking for a job (the job cannot look for them) then their needs are completely different from the needs of those who are already in the workforce.
So everyday people are facing different challenges and when those challenges are not met we have what is known as the gap between have and have-nots; it is that gap which makes people different.
In a society where the number of unemployed working class people outnumber employed people we get a gap can result in trouble.
The challenge is how society can go about creating more employment in order to reduce the gap between the haves and have-nots, the rich and the poor.
Let’s take the case of Papua New Guinea. I find it hard to understand how so many people survive without employment and how many of those unemployed people, both literate and illiterate, are still living in the city.
We don’t have the exact number of people who are working (public and private sector), those in school, those not in school, and those who are looking for employment. The fact that we don’t know of their existence prevents us from knowing where our country is heading, for example, in terms of development.
PNG is a modern country in the sense that we have been exposed to modern technology and therefore a part of the global community.
The challenge now is for the county to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, between the haves and have-nots so that we can overcome the difficulties of the have-nots and improve their living standards.

Neven Amugl
Chimbu