It’s a big ask, making wealth history. So what exactly do we mean? Well, we’re not against money and possessions per se. There’s nothing wrong with having stuff. What we see around us is different however, because our wealth is based on others’ poverty and on the exploitation of the earth. So what we’re against is really inequality and greed. Let me explain those two things a bit more.
Firstly, the world’s resources are distributed very unevenly. The world’s richest 500 people have more money between them than the world’s poorest 416 million people. That is obscene, pure and simple. So, we’re interested in redistribution, in the one-way transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor, in fairness and equal shares for everyone. We’re interested in generosity at every level, from debt cancellation between nations, to individuals learning to live with less so they can give more away.
Secondly, we in the developed world are greedy. Regardless of whether we consider ourselves rich or not, we’re immensely privileged. We don’t see greed in ourselves very often, because there’s always someone richer than we are - there’s those 500 people I just mentioned. We want to examine our own lifestyles, and make sure we’re not being greedy. You can read up on sustainability elsewhere on this site, but it just isn’t physically possible for everyone on the planet to have the luxuries we give ourselves, and our insatiable appetites for resources that can’t be replaced means that we won’t even be able to have those luxuries for ourselves before very long.
Let me say again, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with wealth. But when gain is made through another’s loss, whether that be an exploited community or an exploited natural resource, that gain is wrong. Unfortunately for us in the western world, that principle forces us to examine an awful lot of our gains.
So what can we do?
You can explore the categories on the right for practical information, but here are some examples of the kind of things we can do.
- Reduce our ‘footprint’. There’s a lot of press about this at the moment, particularly about carbon footprints, but carbon is just one aspect. There are other pollutants we need to cut back on, and other resources we need to use less of.
- Shop ethically. We enjoy huge consumer choice in the Western world, but we need to exercise a little more caution in what we spend our money on. From conflict diamonds to unfair coffee prices, to sweatshops and child labour, there are a thousand hidden human costs behind the low prices we pay.
- Take responsibility. Globalisation has brought us great benefits in travel, cultural exchange, and availability of goods. But we can’t claim the benefits of a ‘global village’ without taking responsibility for the problems of such a system.
- Choose a simpler life. Our constant striving to get ahead of the next guy always pushes someone else down. To stop the inequality, and exploitation of the people lower down the social ladder, be it in our own country or abroad, we need to scale back our own lifestyles.
- Live generously. There is a place for wealth, because wealth can be a force for good in the right hands. People using money well, living generously with their time and their money, will make more difference than any number of boycotts and political protests.
Check out the categories on the right for loads more.
April 27, 2007 at 3:26 pm
socialist bastards. it’s not the wealthies fault for being successful and being given the freedom of a free market economy. it is not for the rest of the world to mop up africa’s shit bucket ever 20 years. if they want to be more developed they should take it upon themselves to make a difference not b lazy and leav it to westerners
April 27, 2007 at 4:06 pm
well, point taken. I don’t want to turn a blind eye to corruption and mismanagement, and lay the blame entirely on the west’s doorstep. But you can’t tell someone to stand up for themselves while you punch them in the face, and that’s pretty much what our trade laws do at the moment.
The main problem is that no matter what the third world does, it will never enjoy our lifestyle - because we use too much of everything. Are we entitled to more than our fair share of the world’s resources because we got there first? I think not.
April 27, 2007 at 7:21 pm
The only reason the west is as successful as you stated in your comment is because we exploit them so much. Where does our wealth come from? Where does our coffee come from? Where do almost all our products come from?
Poor countries. We are rich because we exploit the poor. . not through any major developments of our own. Only selfish abuse of those less fortunate has got us here.
I think saying that Africa is lazy, and waiting for the west to do everything is an exaggeration. Perhaps you should at least have a look at what damage the debt Western countries hold against Africa is doing before making such bold statements.
Why should the rest of the world suffer because of our greed? Never mind the “laziness” of Africa
Your comment is appreciated, even if to prove our point.
April 27, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Again, I have no desire to use big words - I don’t know any - but, in your own, it absolutely is for the rest of the world, specifically the UK, to mop up africa’s ’shit bucket’, considering that we were the ones who gave them the bucket in the first place through colonisation, forcing them to grow our crops and not theirs, trying to teach them to be British and generally doing our best to destroy their culture and their livelihood.
You can make any number of claims about what we already do - the aid we give, that kind of thing - but the truth is that the way we give our aid benefits us, not them. Put simply, African countries are forced to spend the money we give them in aid buying resources from us, creating jobs and wealth in Britain, not Africa.
Fair? no. It’s not even like we’re leaving them to get on with cleaning thier bucket themselves. Every time they make a step we’re piling more in.
April 29, 2007 at 4:29 pm
If we are talking about shit buckets, who are the greatest polluters on this planet? And who ends up ‘carrying the can’(’scuse the pun) for that?
April 30, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Hey Jen…firstly, learn how to spell, secondly, don’t write about what you don’t know. People in Africa aren’t ‘lazy’ they work harder than you and me, who is it who suffers from our pollution?
May 10, 2007 at 12:25 pm
When talking about distribution of resources I think it is important to distinguish between limited resources and unlimited resources. The amount of money that the West has is not a limited resource. Money is not worth anything until it is spent: money is just a promise. When someone in the West buys something produced in the West the amount of money in the West is unchanged and the amount of resources in the West (in most cases) increases.
Imagine a lumberjack and a chair maker have £40 each. Imagine the wood cutter doesn’t have any costs and sells enough wood to make a chair for £10 and that the chair maker sells chairs for £20 each.
One day the lumberjack buys two chairs from the chair maker and the chair maker makes two more chairs for himself. The chair maker has to give the lumberjack £40 for wood at the beginning of the day and the lumberjack has to give the chair maker £40 for two of the chairs at the end of the day. They both end up with the same amount of money as they started the day with but they both have two chairs that they didn’t have at the start of the day, one of which they can give to someone who doesn’t have a chair.
Now imagine that while sitting on their chairs that night, both of them read this website. The next day the lumberjack decides that though he could do with a couple more chairs he really only needs one more chair and places his order for one chair, the chair maker, seeing that he will make less money today decides he can only afford to make one chair for himself too. £20 changes hands in both directions so they still have the same amount of money at the end of the second day, but today they do not have a spare chair to give to someone else.
Now there are two problems with this story. One is that most people are not self employed and instead work for larger businesses, the second is that wood is a limited resource.
Starting with the first of these problems, the story is an analogy to try and understand larger economies. The resources or wealth of an economy are not a product of the value of the money that the economy holds on to at a point in time, but how fast the money can move around in the economy. In general and with a large number of people over a period of time, the more money people spend, the better off they will be. Encouraging a frugal lifestyle, if it were effective and independent of other actions, would reduce the wealth in the first world without benefiting anyone at all.
The second issue is that of limited resources. There are many resources that are limited and it is important that we act in a way that not only conserves these, but increases the value we can get from our consumption of them. Technology is essentially about doing this. Time is a limited resource amongst a fixed number of people, the amount of CO2 we can afford to emit is another limited resource. At the moment, the amount of food we can produce around the world is not the limiting factor that is causing starvation in some parts.
What we need is a proper analysis by competent economists of the things that we should and should not conserve in order to increase wealth around the world. I am not an economist, the thoughts and the story on this page are just my own, but I know enough to know that living by a naive philosophy is not going to most effectively make a impact on the state of the third world.
I am making a point here to try and balance some of the misconceptions that I think might be promoted by this site and I do not want you to think that I do not believe in going without in order to benefit others. After all, if the lumberjack had kept all the chairs for himself then he would end up with a house full of chairs but without real wealth. I hope that I give away more money every year than most of the visitors to this site, but the only reason I can do that is because I run a business that allows people to pay more than they might for things that they could possibly do without. Let us not destroy ourselves because we feel bad for others, let us make our economy even more successful and be those that push resources from our economy out to increase the real wealth of the poorest. In that way we will hopefully see an end to poverty and not an end to wealth.
May 11, 2007 at 12:38 pm
This is a really interesting comment, and I agree entirely with your conclusion that we need competent economists on the case! I’m not an economist either, by any stretch of the imagination, but I am familiar with the idea that money isn’t actually a limited resource. Your economic parable illustrates that very well.
The problem is that nothing is that simple. In a closed system and with the assumption that people are going to treat each other fairly, this works fine. But factor in just one unequal trade relationship, and it’s a very different story. Imagine the chair maker tells the lumberjack he’s only going to pay him £10 for wood now, and that the lumberjack has nobody else to sell to. Suddenly he can no longer afford the products he is helping to produce.
Consumers in the West buying products made locally expands the wealth in circulation within the developed world at no particular loss to anyone. But when we make those products in less developed countries to capitalise on lower wages, the whole system becomes unbalanced. We put profit above people, and as long as those people are on the other side of the world, we don’t have to see the consequences of our actions.
I am totally in favour of what you are doing in running a business and living generously. That’s just as important as saying no to consumer habits that are exploiting others. They’re two sides of the same coin. (see the post ‘the opposite of stealing’)
Thanks for your post. We’re looking for answers rather than offering them, and this is a constructive contribution.
May 11, 2007 at 2:00 pm
[...] What do we mean? [...]
August 25, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Great blog project, don’t worry about the trolls, we could live better on less, libraries, making goods to last longer, sharing, open source, food from the garden…however I do feel you need to look at some more things to get where you are going.
Whose common future, here http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/item.shtml?x=52004
is essential.
also look at the man who said:
From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuries, and like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.
its about access to resources that we maintain in a better state than we found them or at least as good.
While I guess you worship at the church of no shopping, I am sure you aware that other religions/spiritual traditions share the same goal, for example have a look at my take on spirituality and the abolition of worthless waste
commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/derek_wall/2007/05/politics_can_get_you_down.html
if you want a review copy of Babylon and beyond…mail me with your address and I will put it in the post.
well done!
November 26, 2007 at 12:38 am
There’s a video documentary called “The Century of the Self” this is a “must watch” video for folks that may be interested in your blog. Check it out: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2637635365191428174
March 21, 2008 at 4:25 am
You once mentioned religion (Christians) and Environment.
Religion is one aspect of man and society. There are other aspects of man (and society) and all of them need to be held at equilibrium. These aspects may be peculiar, different from each other, but surely they are all inter-related. An idea belongs to a set of ideas.
Thus, I think, one should think of his faith in relation to other aspects, like environment, of him. And I think everybody already does that whether they are conscious about it or not. (Another example of that is religion and politics.)
I agree there won’t be much to be incorporated in all of them. It would be like merging your thumb with your forefinger so that you become four-fingers - if that is what people want or mean. I guess there must be an instance when any aspect tends to be overblown that makes it hot and highly controversial.
June 3, 2008 at 12:22 am
Nathan Phillips, when you say
“let us make our economy even more successful and be those that push resources from our economy out to increase the real wealth of the poorest. In that way we will hopefully see an end to poverty and not an end to wealth.”
are you not referring to the trickle down theory? you know if the pie gets bigger, then everyones slice gets bigger. I thought this was widely accepted as a myth, something that has been used to allow developed/developing countries to over-develop at the cost of the under-developed countries.