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.
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Arma virumque cano...
Man is free; yet we must not suppose that he is at liberty to do everything he pleases, for he becomes a slave the moment he allows his actions to be ruled by passion. --Giacomo Casanova