We live in a post-rational world, where everyone tries to be as moral as possible and it is fashionable to boast about emotional-intelligence credentials: the ability to feel what other people are feeling. This is supported by studies in behavioural economics, which show that people are highly irrational, displacing the dry old studies of 'economic man' that sought to explain how individuals make rational choices designed to maximise their utilities. 

In the age of competitive victimhood, power lies in proving that you are more victimised than the other victims. This can be achieved by complaining louder and more effectively than the other complainers. The forgotten man in this context is the person who goes through life quietly, complaining about nothing, and gets sadly left behind because he has failed to hone his complaining skills. This is a very risky position to find yourself in. It results in being overlooked when public policy is formulated.
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The great hero Robin Hood took from the rich to give to the poor. Fixing inequality within the local surrounds of Nottinghamshire was clearly achievable. All it took was a straightforward system of mandatory redistribution enforced by a band of merry men. But today it is often said that foreign aid programmes take from the ​poor in rich countries, to give to the rich in poor countries. Inequality between countries is therefore a complex thing to fix. Poor people in poor countries are increasingly better off as they close the global inequality gap, but poor people in rich countries (so, not poor poor in a global sense but poor by rich-country standards) are falling further behind their wealthy neighbours in the local inequality stakes.