The post-war years in Western Europe in general have often been called the Golden Age, an age of the mixed economy, an admittedly sometimes faltering economy but in which there was full employment without inflation. There was also secular growth in the economy. It was a confident society, with belief in the future, in which there was no fear then of a population decline. Many governments tried to make society more inclusive of the poor and the distressed, the disabled and the sick, the children and the elderly who could not support themselves.

Since then, in more recent years, growing inequality has befallen many countries. There have been marked tendencies in the market economies for the poor to get poorer and the rich richer. The shift has coincided with a masochistic rush on the part of governments to prostrate themselves before market forces.

As usual with Malta, most of this process was shifted by some 30 years. But since then, and particularly in the last 10 years, we have well and truly caught up. Our openness to the world has dramatically shortened the lags with which we have traditionally followed trends elsewhere. Membership of the EU has brought us, kicking and screaming, into the maelstrom of the global economy.

There is not much dispute about inequality having got more severe. The dispute centres on what can be done about it, or even whether anything can be done about it. Some put the growing inequality down to two main causes: changes in technology and changes in the pattern of international trade.

Technological change is apt to increase unemployment in the short run whenever it raises productivity and enables goods and services to be produced more efficiently with less labour. The advances in automation and, especially in information technology, have been at the expense of unskilled workers with little education. The more unemployment, the more the downward pressure on wages from people desperate for work.

The poor, including pensioners, have also been attacked by indexing benefits to prices instead of wages. Since prices have not generally risen as much as wages, the poor who are not working have been the ones who have been made to suffer.

The same core countries (more or less the G7) dominate world commerce as much as they did a century ago. But international trade has been more under the control of multinational corporations and the new trading blocs while it has also been generally liberalised. Within the more global economy, the competition from newly industrialised countries has cut most sharply at the bargaining power of unskilled workers. Theirs are the jobs lost to the cheaper labour abroad and theirs the wages put under threat as manufacturing and labour-intensive industries have moved to India, Indonesia, China or other countries.

The government is certainly not powerless. It can cushion the effect of the competition, even if it cannot damp it right down. Better training needs to be provided for youngsters and others who cannot get into jobs at all, lacking the skills which employers require. The government has done something about that but the ETC needs to do more.

The government can also support the wages of the low paid so that their take-home pay may be larger than it would otherwise be. This has the effect of easing the poverty trap. In Malta we have a minimum wage, but it is not enough.

Even if inequality increases when low wages are under such pressure from technology and overseas competition, the welfare system is the more important influence on the lot of the poor. In the 1970s, transfers from the better-off to the less well-off and the taxation which funded them, by and large had the intended redistributive effect.

But from the mid-1990s onwards, inequality was promoted quite deliberately by a move from progressive income taxes to regressive indirect ones. Direct taxation of income is "progressive": those with higher incomes pay more in tax. Indirect taxation on goods and services in the form of VAT and other taxes is regressive. For the less well-off the indirect taxes represent a larger proportion of their lower incomes.

When poverty strikes a family, the youngest members become its most innocent and vulnerable victims. Poverty in early childhood can prove to be a handicap for life.

It is the same story with training programmes. If low levels of skill are partly responsible for unemployment, low wages and the consequent inequality, it makes the best of sense to put a large effort into training and even more into schooling at younger ages when basic attitudes to learning are established.

So something has to be done to raise the bottom. Rising relative wages have been the main source of growing inequality. The richer have not been called on to make sacrifices themselves. Successive governments have concentrated on those who have little in the way of income and not much of anything in the way of wealth and almost entirely failed to tackle those with plenty of both. Inequality has therefore been added to even more.

Public services matter most to the poorer because they are dependent on the public services to get their essential needs satisfied; they have nowhere else to go. If poorer people are dissatisfied with the school their children attend, or will have to attend in the future, they do not have the money to buy a place in a private school. If they are dissatisfied with the medical care they receive, they cannot go to a private doctor.

True, the average standard of living is much higher than it was 50 years ago. Working conditions are less arduous and less dangerous. Housing has been improved and, even in the Mandragg you will find bathrooms, hot water, refrigerators and washing machines. The expectation of life is higher than a century ago. You would think we would be pretty pleased.

But we are not. The modern social paradox is that progress of this kind, resting on increased productivity and wealth, has been accompanied by a profound sense of unease. We wonder where the wealth is leading us. People are better off but do not necessarily feel it.

Looking at what is happening, we seem to be engaged on a self-defeating, even futile, task. It seems as though the philosopher Emerson had it right, when he said: "Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover".