2% of popn. own half the wealth

[Sr. AGiC.]

Quoting Senethro from 15:56, 8th Dec 2006
Where did I criticise you for earning money? Earning money isn't a problem, denying the environmental advantages that permitted you to earn that money is a problem, acting to prevent expansion of this beneficial environment is a problem.

I never denied those advantages. I think you will find i said in my previous post "I was given opportunities to work for it, for which i am grateful". Is that a denial of the beneficial environment i grew up in?

[Senethro]

If you don't deny those advantages, why are you not in favour of expanding their reach?

[Sr. AGiC.]

I dont have the "fuck em all" principle. By paying the amount of tax i do i am not saying fuck em all. I have the "please use it wisely" principle.

With regard to my deleted post i tried to edit my previous but i re-posted it instead.

[Sr. AGiC.]

Quoting Senethro from 16:01, 8th Dec 2006
If you don't deny those advantages, why are you not in favour of expanding their reach?

I dont deny them and i am not ashamed of them. I am proud that i am in a country that gives people those advantages and a family that has worked hard to give me advantages in life, i dont feel guilty about. Nor SHOULD i feel guilty about.

Back to my previous comment "you cannot help the poor by being poor".

By being very wealthy i will be able to help more people than by feeling guilty about being wealthy and earning average money.

[Humphrey]

The more I earn the more skint I seem to be and the more the bastard government takes off me. I get considerably more than the average wage and yet when I go and see my american inlaws they wince when they hear what I earn and talk about how low incomes in the UK seem to be.

So in summery, our incomes are low (with the exception of Mr Comedy), our taxes are stupidly high and to make matters worse, even a crappy bungalow in Slough costs over 300 grand.

I suggest we all move to the nearest tax haven

[hr]

http://www.livejournal.com/users/humphrey_clarke/

[Senethro]

We can blame that on the previous generation. As Mr. Comedy has noticed, they're going to pull the pension ladder up after they've climbed it.

Bastards.

Is there no way we can sabotage the property market or something?

[novium]

it's the babyboomers. They're going to screw us over until they're dead, which will be when we're old, too.

[hr]

tamen ira procul absit, cum qua nihil recte fieri, nihil considerate potest.

[LonelyPilgrim]

May I just interject that you are all talking about money in absolute terms and equating it with wealth, which it is not?

Purchasing power per pound or dollar varies from country to country and even quite a lot within countries. The house I live in is valued at about $200,000 here. This very same house in somewhere like Santa Cruz, California would be worth several million dollars. Location matters, and not just in real estate.

When you get caught up in comparing monetary incomes, you skew the whole picture. Yes, 2% of the people possess 98% of the wealth (although as I alluded in my last post that statistic by itself doesn't tell us much, since neither you nor I would normally consider ourselves owners of a motorway, for example). However, only about 50% of people live below the UN designated poverty line. Granted that's not very good, but it does paint a somewhat different picture from the 2%-wealth statistic. Even then, that fails to take into consideration that quite a lot of people still live in traditional economies of barter and subsistence that have little need for money. There is no reliable way to gauge how much 'wealth' such people possess, and so they tend to get counted as having nothing, when in fact they could be quite content with their lives.

We in the West are always judging the well-being of other people by our own standards, and many times those standards don't apply very well. We think everyone ought to want to be just like us, but that often isn't the case. So, we call them backward and talk about how much they don't have and we say 'if only they could have our advantages...' and it's all as a way of avoiding asking ourselves why they don't want what we have.

Once again, I'm not saying there isn't a problem. It's just that the scope of the problem is often exaggerated because it's impossible to quantify, but we try to do so anyway.

[hr]

Arma virumque cano...

[Senethro]

The stench of romanticism for a simpler way of living is thick upon this thread. I haven't smelt its like since... ah.

Peasant virtues LP?

[novium]

or perhaps you've been indulging in paternalistic sentiment towards the poor benighted heathens? I detect a hint of cultural imperialism as well.

[hr]

tamen ira procul absit, cum qua nihil recte fieri, nihil considerate potest.

[LonelyPilgrim]

Quoting Senethro from 23:02, 8th Dec 2006
The stench of romanticism for a simpler way of living is thick upon this thread. I haven't smelt its like since... ah.

Peasant virtues LP?

Senethro, you have a faulty memory if you think I've ever waxed romantic about peasant 'virtues'. I live in a society that retains the vestiges of a peasant community. The peasant mindset is closed mindedness, suspicion of everyone who isn't kin, fear of modernity, and an ingrained sense of victimhood. Not particularly attractive.

There are plenty of other simpler lifestyles to choose from, thank you.

Still, that wasn't my point. My two points were this:

1. You can't reduce this discussion to comparisons of annual incomes. Cost of living varies so widely from place to place that any such comparison is meaningless unless you adjust for the cost of living, which I doubt anyone commenting here is qualified to do, let alone has the time or inclination to do so.

And as a subpoint to that, the original discussion is about wealth anyway, and money, strictly speaking isn't wealth. You can have a billion dollars and not technically be wealthy. Wealth is the possession of things that have value. Things. Land, commodoties, art, public goods, cars, boats, planes... things which are not usually very susceptible to sudden economic changes, things which are useful. That's why wealth has traditionally been measured in terms of land, livestock, business ownership, and gold.

2. My second point was that we are being very culturally imperialistic when we assume that because someone living somewhere in Africa doesn't have a TV and a $100,000 home that they must be miserable with their life.

The real tragedy is not that individuals in the rest of the world are poorer than we are. The tragedy is that their governments are to poor, to corrupt, or to disinterested to provide law and order, security, modern medicine, education, and modern infrastructure to their people. The tools are not being provided to people that would give them the option to participate in our 'modern' world.

Now, this may be a shock to some of the surface issue liberals on here who never dig deeper into these matters, but the failure to provide these social services and infrastructure development is rarely traceable to the big bad evil West. Further, Western efforts to aid development have a tendency to further the internal economic disparity within other countries. Not always, but enough to seriously call into question the ability of the West to effectively spread the wealth if it were so inclined.

And of course, most of our 'wealth' doesn't exist in any tangible form. If you ever want to twist your brain in a knot, study the stock market and try to figure out what it is, precisely. It creates wealth out of nothing, which is another reason the West has so much more than everyone else: we make it up as we go along.



[hr]

Arma virumque cano...