MONEY MONEY MONEY

[Stanley]

MONEY MONEY MONEY

26 July 2005

When I was a lad I often travelled on the tram to Manchester and I can remember watching all the houses slide past and wondering where all the money came from to pay for them. Even then I was aware that the total value of all the property in the country was vast.
This old memory came to mind when I saw this news item; ‘After putting a price tag on all our buildings, equipment and other assets, the Office for National Statistics said the country was worth £5.3 trillion at the end of 2003. Or to be more precise: £5,344bn or £5,344,000,000,000.’ Speaking as a man who found corn in Egypt the other day, a fiver in the pocket of a jacket I hadn’t worn for a while, this amount of money is meaningless, I have nothing to judge it by. What was slightly more meaningful was the statistic that wealth has increased 77% since 1997. So, looking at my own personal slice of the action, I’m lagging behind in a big way!
I remember spending a year looking at Inter-War social history and coming to the conclusion that when everything was boiled down, the biggest single social problem was the distribution of wealth. Of course I was late into the game, Marx and Engels had come to the same conclusion long before me, add your own names to the list.
Larry Elliott, economics editor of The Guardian on Thursday June 24, 2004 wrote: ‘Income inequality in Britain rose by 40% between 1979 and 2001, a larger increase than in any other developed country, with a particularly pronounced divergence between the super-rich and the abject poor.’ The same pattern can be seen internationally and it seems to me that when we are looking for an answer to the world’s ills, including the present debate on what drives suicide bombers, there might be a bit of a clue here.
The gap isn’t just a matter of money, it has vast implications for relative standards of opportunity, education and health. Even if these disparities in income could be reversed tomorrow it would take generations for the results to work their way through the system and raise the quality of life of the deprived.
The Morning Chronicle, introducing the 1849 survey of social conditions in Britain, stated; “No man of feeling or reflection can look abroad without being shocked and startled by the sight of enormous wealth and unbounded luxury, placed in direct juxtaposition with the lowest extremes of indigence and privation. Is this contrast a necessary result of the unalterable laws of nature, or simply the sure indication of an effete social system?"
The startling fact is that 150 years later this statement is still true. As I write this, Dr. Tessa Stone, the director of the education charity the Sutton Trust, is saying on Radio 4 that in the UK, Europe and North America, the best indicator of the eventual social class of children is the experience of their parents and not the standard of education. In other words, social mobility in the very poor is declining because the dice are loaded against them.
Alright, I’ve posed a problem but have no answer. I can understand why the 19th century revolutionaries thought they had to smash the old system and try a different approach. They failed of course, it is ironic that the last large Communist economy, China, has made it’s advances only by embracing capitalism with all the potential for disparity that this entails.
Perhaps there is an unbreakable law of nature that states that 50% of the world has to live in poverty to allow the rest to progress. Now that’s a frightening thought but all the evidence seems to be pointing that way. I reject this of course but can anyone help me make sense of this problem?

26 July 2005
[Another article that is even more pertinent today...]