Good may be difficult but bad must go.

Getting rid of bad does not mean that good will follow, writes a professor. We have a natural indignation against injustice and unfairness. Not just humans, even monkeys have a sense of fairness and will reject unequal reward. But we get so engrossed in fighting injustice that we are unable to give sufficient attention to what to replace it with. " It is easier to mobilize against injustice than for justice," writes the professor. " We are more enthusiastic to fight the bad - say, hunger and poverty - than to fight for, say, the kind of growth and development that makes food and sustainable livelihoods plentiful." It is possible that what is injustice to some people is highly moral duty to others. A report in Britain says that rich parents create a ' glass floor ' underneath their children which means that mediocre children from middle class families have a 35% higher chance of becoming high earners than children from poorer families. " A society in which the success or failure of children with equal ability rests on the social and economic status of their parents is not a fair one," says the report. Predictably, this has drawn an angry response from others who see it as parental duty to help children to get on the career ladder. If you help your friend's child to write a proper resume, which helps her to get a coveted job, is it wrong? Middle class children get help with their homework and are taken on educational trips by parents. Such inequality is stark in India. Most middle class people have attained their status through education or some particular talent they possess while vast numbers of poor people are illiterate. Which means that children with educated parents get an automatic advantage from birth simply because their parents talk to them so that by the time children start attending school middle class children are already ahead in IQ tests. In the US poor parents are being taught how to talk to their children. Thus families make a lot of difference. So should middle class parents be forbidden from reading bedtime stories to their children? 2,400 year ago Plato recommended that children of the elite should be taken away and brought up by the state, to create equality, which Aristotle opposed. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that removing injustice and corruption leads to removal of poverty. " Teachers and nurses often do not show up for work, but that does not mean that performance would improve much if they did. Policemen may stop asking for bribes, but that won't make them better at catching criminals and preventing crime," writes the professor. Perhaps. The trouble is that the fight against poverty is led by hypocrites who do it for personal gain. But, as long as bad persists good cannot enter, so bad must go first.