I think that "disease" is a misleading term, because it makes it sound like an act of god or nature. I'd say it's more like a moral evil. Because there are people in power who have the ability to eradicate this, simply by paying their workers more, or allocating government money to public services rather than to tax cuts for the rich, but they don't. They push austerity, they exploit greedily, and those are deliberate human acts of selfish evil.

I'd say that the global implicit and explicit ideology of "greed is good" and "might makes right", as well as the tendency of our systems towards nearly boundless concentration of resources and power in the hands of few, is the real disease.