Monday, 11 April 2011
On several occasions over the years I've had a few relatives who've suggested various ways of or reasons to make more money than I do. These have varied from putting the effort into various reasonable career choices, to investment in stocks, property or currency exchange, to legal but essentially 'pyramid-scheme' type ventures and think-and-grow-rich concepts. Perhaps the most recent occasion which springs to mind was nigh on half a year ago now, and seemed more along the think-and-grow-rich lines than anything else. In fairness, I didn't actually read the whole book recommended to me; but in anticipation of further prodding on that subject, at the time I had these thoughts regarding the subject of wealth:
(It's a slightly involved discussion, but my attempts at creating a teaser were not wholly successful...)

We might think of wealth as money, but it's not - money is just a convenient way of measuring and exchanging wealth. Wealth is anything which has significant value between enough people to matter. This is to distinguish between wealth and things of value like 'love,' 'trust' and so on; though it should be noted that even love and trust are often converted into money - think of gold-diggers, confidence tricksters and the like. And though I'd not intended it this, perhaps better than anything else, illustrates my main point; there are probably any number of sources for wealth, but definitely a limited supply. If everyone, or even a significant enough minority, sought to turn love or trust into a source of material wealth, love and trust (which in principle could be endless) would soon enough become very scarce commodities.

If pursuit of wealth could, in theory, make love or trust scarce, what does that say about more conventional commodities or sources of wealth? And perhaps more to the point, if we can recognise that love or trust can be turned into commodities for the accumulation of wealth, what does it say about so many other things which generally are not recognised as such? A simple example of a commodity in danger of becoming scarce recently is the ozone in our atmosphere; products were sold for a profit, with the consumption of ozone as a by-product. It's not a subject I'm very familiar with, but from what I know, aerosoles and the like are not exceptionally more expensive to produce nor buy now without CFCs than they were with; and thus, that threat to our global community was averted. Of course, in a remarkably analogous case, carbon emissions have been soundly established as a measureable and even priceable commodity for over a decade in theory, yet it's astounding how many businesses and industries (nearly all of them) have been unwilling to actually put any price or even genuine measurement on their use of this commodity.

This, I believe, is nothing more than theft: The use, without payment or even acknowledgement of a measureable (and to an extent even priceable) commodity belonging to the whole human race - to whit, the atmosphere, its carbon content and the resulting climate conditions which could drastically affect the lives of billions.

And yet this, in essence, is the concept on which much of humanity's economic growth is based. When cutting down forests we're not stealing part of the planet's oxygenation system, we're 'developing' some natural, unowned and presumably useless 'potential.' When burning fossil fuels in coal power stations, airplanes and cars we're simply adding to our own wealth in the form of convenience and transport, and surely not stealing from the common wealth of the world's atmosphere! If we were honest with ourselves and in our valuation of wealth, the costs to the planet's oxygen supply and carbon storage capacity caused by deforestation (never mind environmental concerns like ecological impact and loss of biodiversity) would be required by law of any proposed development plans. If we were honest with ourselves and in our valuation of wealth, the release of past stored carbon caused by burning fossil fuels would have just as high a price tag affixed.

Even before the 20th century, there had been some impact from this attitude of increasing personal wealth by freely taking any exploitable natural resource, though aside from the many extinct and endangered species I don't know enough to give specific examples. (I read somewhere ages ago that over-farming in north Africa in Roman times contributed to the growth of the Sahara desert, but it seems dubious and I don't recall seeing it verified anywhere.) But by the '50s we had the 'United Nations'; and some of the major decolonial movements were well under way in the '60s and '70s; and the sciences on global issues like over-fishing, de-forestation, depletion of fertilizers, the ozone layer and global warming were starting to draw fairly sound conclusions by the '70s and '80s. . . . So what's our excuse in recent decades? How can we pretend, especially after the end of the useful diversion of the Cold War, that the general course of our actions both as a species and often as individuals has been anything other than naked greed, without regard to consequences?

Since I'm not writing specifically to the relative in question, the above is a more in-depth introduction to my argument. Put simply:

- Wealth consists in that which has value (to enough people)
- All things on earth have a limit, and we're pushing that limit in perhaps every field
- So wealth is limited
- So almost always, increasing my wealth means decreasing someone else's

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I believe that if I specifically seek out a hundred dollars which I don't need and wouldn't otherwise have had, no matter how vaguely or indirectly my gain might ultimately affect ten or twenty or thirty others who live on less than a dollar a day, my petty gain simply isn't worth it. Most or all of my gain will come from folk in my own, wealthy community of course - but where did their wealth come from, and their source's wealth in turn?

Sometimes I almost scream in frustration at how we don't even bother to recognise the centuries of slavery or indentured service, the theft and pillaging, the colonisation and rule over second-class citizens from which we, as the inheritants of a major European power, have filled our pockets. Heck, we've barely even begun to recognise the theft, racism and genocide in our own small corner of the globe - wouldn't it be funny to see even just a meagre tenth of Australia's past and present mining profits paid to the original owners of the land on which those resources were developed? It's an interesting thought exercise; arguably the resources weren't stolen since the Aborigines had little use for them, but the land largely was stolen from various tribes, and use of the resources found there should incur some kind of fee even if it hadn't been. Of course the original owners are long dead, and how accurately can we apply inheritance or next-of-kin rights now?; but on the other hand supposing we added even quite moderate compound interest rates on these 50-200 year-old debts?

Having recently read an anthology of Mark Twain, I'm humorously reminded of The Case of George Fisher which describes how the inheritants of a property attacked by Indians in 1813 were awarded $8,873 dollars in damages in April of 1848, thirty-five years later, for damage supposedly caused by the troops who chased the Indians off; a figure which raised for various reasons and after several appeals to an alleged $133,323 by 1860 (though they'd already been paid $67,000 of it from appeals in previous years). Twain provides references for his 1870 readers (which I obviously haven't checked), at which time the descendants of George Fisher (who himself had never claimed any damages) were apparently repeating the attempt of 1860, sadly interrupted by the civil war, to get more than the $67,000 they'd already been awarded. Any such greed and corruption aside, it's still amusing and very disheartening to think how things might turn out if international law or the specific laws of America, Australia, Zimbabwe or all the other countries dominated by colonial powers recognised the war crimes of the colonial powers against the lands' original owners and their heirs. The laws ensure that there's no justice.

That said, it doesn't take a genius to realise (or even to simply look up the statistics) that wealthier kids generally wind up as wealthier adults - less incentive for petty crime, better education, better examples, better connections... it all adds up. And that's simply within wealthy nations, with no reference to the huge infrastructure and industrial advantages we enjoy over poorer countries. This is against anyone short-sighted enough to parrot some stupid line about hard work paying off and shunting the responsibility for poverty onto the victim's shoulders. If I earn over 500 AU dollars a week without trying, what does that say about the 2 or 3 BILLION people on earth who live on less than two dollars a day!?

WHAT KIND OF FUCKED-UP, ARROGANT CUNT OF A SOCIETY WOULD THINK ANYONE SHOULD AIM HIGHER!?

It staggers the mind, when you really think about it. Yes, let's all keep building as high as we can on the naked theft and brutal oppression of our earlier generations, throw a few coins to Oxfam every month and pretend we're good people. Hurray!

Trouble is, we generally don't think about it. If we did, we'd know that we should all aim lower. Buy less, spend less, give more and don't try to earn more unless you are genuinely putting all of it towards improving others' lot. When I counted my coin collection - money I didn't miss and don't need - my first thought was why I would bank it, rather than putting it to some better use.

There'll always be some people who'll try to gain their dollars through theft or scams or exploitation; but until our global community are all on a more or less equal footing, I believe we should recognise that even our 'honest' dollars have been passed on by blood-stained hands, in some cases quite literally. Beyond genuine necessities, every dollar I earn is a dollar that others have lost; and given the world's absurdly unequal distribution of wealth, it's obviously not the millionaires who are losing their money to me.

Later notes (Monday, 30 May & Saturday, 11 June 2011):
The conclusion of the above ('every dollar I earn is a dollar that others have lost') over-draws the issue somewhat. For starters, while we are approaching or pushing the limit of global natural wealth in many areas and have exceeded the limit in others, in some areas there are as-yet under-tapped resources which are essentially limitless (eg. wind, wave, solar and other renewable energy sources) and in other areas we are hundreds of years away from exhausting the resource. I believe coal is one such example; we'll bake the planet long before we run out of it, though I hear we're already having to use more difficult and destructive extraction methods for less accessible deposits (underground coal gasification). But the fact remains that the limits of our finite planet make it vital for humanity, in the next decade or two, to be working towards a steady-state economy; continued dependance on constant economic growth will likely lead towards a crash landing. I don't know nearly enough about economics to know how a steady-state economy would work,* and I don't know how the continued commodification and sale of renewable energies or the like would influence the argument above regarding the limits of global wealth.

However another, and perhaps better, way of looking at the issue is hypothetical: Given the well-known facts of colonialism, oppression and naked theft of resources and human wealth from what are now third world countries, the current global distribution of wealth is obviously unfair. The only way we could hypothetically begin with a fair starting point is if every adult had (at least to begin with) an equal share of global wealth. Based on a few minutes' worth of googling global GDP and the like, that would probably mean an income of anywhere from $6000 to $20,000 US dollars per year. Historical examples - such as Germany after WW1, if memory serves - suggest that some people would manage to accumulate vast wealth even from an equal starting point. But my question is whether they'd do so by fair or morally acceptable means and, equally important, whether we'd be stupid enough to allow them?

All that scenario serves to illustrate more clearly is that increasing one's personal wealth will, by definition, decrease someone else's. Or more precisely, now that I come to think of it, increasing one's wealth at a rate higher than the rate of global growth either decreases others' wealth, or detracts from their share of global growth. This is something which everyone earning more than that $20,000 per year average of global wealth would do well to consider, if they're aiming to increase their wealth still further. The current distribution of global wealth makes it clear where most of our gains are ultimately coming from.

* Just looking it up briefly before posting this, it turns out that several key economists, from Adam Smith down through John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes have predicted not only the inevitability but ultimately the desirability of a halt to economic growth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state_economy#History_of_the_concept