I am travelling by train thorough a rainy Bulgaria - maybe that's what gives me a kind of melancholic feeling. Maybe it is just that time of year.

Photo credit: Cassini83 Picture from Wikipedia commons

For the last half an hour I have been hearing an old lady complaining about how hard it is to be retired in today's Bulgaria, and how hard it has been the last twenty years. I heard the same story last week, travelling the same distance in the other direction.

Next to me sits a woman, struggling to learn English with a second hand teach-yourself book that looks no good to me. Will it ever give her something else than a dream of once become part of the big world? 

Bulgaria does not fit into the standard definitions of a developing country, but it is none the less a place where a lot of development has been going on since the fall of communism. When you visit twice yearly, as I do, the material development is almost tangible.

But what is also tangible is that the faster one part of society moves ahead, the further behind a part of society falls. Most of my Bulgarian friends live lives that are very similar to my Swedish friends' lives. But the difference between them and the Bulgarians that don't make it is huge. And I dare to bet that the difference is bigger today than it has ever been since 1989.

Unfortunately or not, Bulgaria does not in any way stand out. In both western and eastern Europe the social inequality has increased for decades.  I would be very surprised if the pattern is not the same in development success stories like India, Brazil and China, as well as in less succesful cases like Ethiopia or Mali.

With Bulgaria's history in mind - the alternatives to this development seem to be even worse. There has been a time when dissident thinking renderd you a place in a camp. There has been a time when the stores where empty. It is better to be poor in a democracy, than to be poor in a dictatorship. But development and democracy comes with a price tag - inequality and injustices towards those too weak to develop. 

We all know about the genocide of American indians that took place while the US became the world's richest country and the world's best working democracy. But the stories of the Amercian losers are endless - appalachian hillbillies living like serfs under coal mining companies. The blacks who where abused in the cotton fields in the south or discarded as unemployed in the ghetto's in the north. Their white counterparts, who shared their fate and faith, but all too often resorted to racial hatred.

Sweden's history is not any merrier. It is the history about denying natives their right to land, denying anyone the right to anything if that right is contrary to bigger econmical interests, contrary to development. But the poor Swedes had at least the opportunity to emigrate.

The history of economic development is ugly. Development is a cynical machine that moves towards increased consumption and increased profits at any price. In Bulgaria today you can see it all - the machines that moves ahead, the masses that struggle to keep the pace, and a tragic minority who falls behind.

It sounds cruel, and it is. But it seems like all other ways ahead have been tested and found worse. Let's accept that, and do our best. But let's also be frank - development will never benefit everyone. If there are winners, there will also be losers.

Postscript: No matter how poor you get in this world - you always own at least one mobile phone. Even if you live in a tiny home built shack without sanitation. Does that mean that wealth is spreading, only that a mobile phone can not be considered wealth?