OPINION
Life is so short and so stuffed with things, it produces long To Do lists. We rearrange these in the hope we’ll get this life thing done. We might move care below career, or money above marriage. We do what we must or what we will…and, well, look, my point is: who even has time for learning?
That’s lower on my list than earning a buck. You may be a disciplined person who lives in pursuit of learning. The rest of us just want a bit of a cuddle, a sandwich and a nice lie down.
This stuff, of course, takes money. You can say “the best things in life are free”. But, these best things are possible only if we survive to freely take them. The crude truth is that money, and the exchanges we make to get it, has a total influence on life, and all the best and worst things in it.
I have tricked you into a little learning. I know you are busy and I get that your life has far more urgent stuff inside it than a few hundred words arranged by me. But, you’re here now so let’s tackle a topic known as “the economy”; a topic I started reading about around a decade ago, and only then because I was working but broke and wanted to understand why.
I’m writing about this for a purpose greater than Helen. For all of us, wealth inequality is on a . I’m not the only one without a house, proper job, super, savings, assets etc. Wealth inequality is up, and that means our chances to enjoy those best things are down.
Health, both mental and physical, is overwhelmingly tied to wealth.
We do not take pleasure in love, sunsets, laughter or much of anything understood as free without adequate wealth. Health, both mental and physical, is to wealth. This is not to say that there aren’t some wealthy folks who experience poor mental or physical health. It is to say that a lack of wealth produces a statistical lack of health. A lack of health that is preventable through a different approach to wealth.
The phrase “wealth inequality” is something to learn. You might often hear it used interchangeably with “income inequality”. This is misleading. Wealth and income are not identical and, in fact, the did not get that way due to income from work. While it is true that there are those who , it’s just as true that most wealth is created from popping out to the letterbox to get a dividend cheque. Some people call this investment. I call this bludging, if I’m in a stink.
Great wealth can only be got, in present conditions, if other people don’t have much of it. A person only gets to be rich if there are less-than-rich people for comparison. And the problem with the present is that the comparison is becoming plainer.
You will read commentators say that talk about inequality is silly; that there’s no real problem that . They will then use science-y terms like “Gini coefficient” to persuade you that wealth accumulation by a few is a reward for personal excellence. If you want to be technical about it “relative Gini” is a better measure. And if you want to be cranky about it: who is so excellent that they deserve a reward equivalent to a small nation’s ? (That’s gross domestic product, sort all of the value of all of the stuff produced and exchanged in a particular place over a particular time, but usually a year.)
Great wealth, which is gained far less by personal excellence than it is by , is not something to be jealous about. It’s something to see both as a relative state which demands the poverty of others and as a form of power. Which you might agree is something that should be more evenly shared.
If you think you can’t look at a national or global economy, or even of your own experience of working, and not come up with a good understanding yourself, you are completely wrong.
Let’s think about Bill Gates, one of the the billion-est of the world’s billionaires, a club containing around two thousand people. He does stuff with his charitable foundation, one built on great personal wealth, that we generally like. But, one day Bill may wake up in a bad mood—we all do—and think, “I just don’t like the shape of Sierra Leone on the map”. Presto, this guy with so much wealth, and power, can stop funding health programs in that region. He was not elected. He was not chosen by us, or by any authority higher than the economy, to be such a powerful guy; a guy with the billions to save lives.
Yes, Gates may continue to be apparently good. But, this ain’t the point. The point is to learn, if you’d like, by asking yourself a few questions. One is: is great wealth really a reward for hard work or personal excellence? Another is: am I okay with the idea of great wealth, even if it is gained by hard work or personal excellence? For me a big one is: what does great wealth do to the real world? Does it have power?
If you think wealth, or its lack, does go hand-in-hand with power, you have now learned what the posh phrase “political economy” means. If you think this learning stuff is annoying, you are completely right. If you think you can’t look at a national or global economy, or even of your own experience of working, and not come up with a good understanding yourself, you are completely wrong.
This is what I want you to learn today: you have a great capacity to learn and you are way more brilliant than you suspect. You can even draw conclusions about the global or the national economy from just thinking about it for a bit. If you ever want to talk about these with someone, you can always try me. You may not learn much from our talk, but you will learn that I am FULL of opinions about the economy.
