Sunday 20 January 2013

Top 100 Could End Poverty

According to the charity Oxfam, in 2012, the Worlds top 100 richest people earned enough money, $240 billion, to end world poverty four times over.
'It's gotten so out of control between rich and poor that one of the obstacles to solving extreme poverty is now extreme wealth' said Ben Phillips, a campaign director at Oxfam.
'We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many. Concentration of resources in the hands of the top one per cent depresses economic activity and makes life harder for everyone else – particularly those at the bottom of the economic ladder. In a world where even basic resources such as land and water are increasingly scarce, we cannot afford to concentrate assets in the hands of a few and leave the many to struggle over what’s left'.
According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty and 2.7 billion live on less than $2 a day which the The World Bank defines as the poverty line.
Maybe we should ask the third of the starving population how the Capitalism system is working out for them because for 100 people, it's brilliant.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

When have humans ever had financial equality? When has there never been poverty? What mechanism has ever worked? Never. Never. None.

Where is poverty the worst? The nations that are more socialist than capitalist.

Q

Cheezy said...

This seems far too broad a statement to me. Of the ten current poorest countries in the world (Congo, Liberia, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Burundi, Central African Republican, Niger, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Togo) none of them could presently be described as ‘socialist’, and only Congo was formerly socialist. Their governments may run their economies in a way that you might understand as being ‘socialist’, maybe because of forced reallocations of land in places like Zimbabwe, but that understanding would be wrong. The old ‘African socialism’ ideal, as typified by Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, is pretty dead now. Sierre Leone is a good example of what’s going on now – it’s an undeveloped basket case, infrastructure wrecked by civil war, and attempting to exploit (non-renewable) mineral wealth for short-term gain, of wrhich very little will eke through to the vast majority of the population, but plenty will be soaked up the government and their friends in big business. The problems of a country like this transcend simple left v right politics (as evidenced by the failure of the IMF to create any lasting improvement in the region) but, at the same time, are deeply political in nature.

Anonymous said...

Yeah I can always count on you to call out MY broad statements... I meant china and India. The Arabic nations are wealthy but monarchy's. the people don't earn livings, the monarchs share some of their wealth to appease the people. Africa is a disaster and a waste of time discussing. Most of the South American nations are poverty ridden fake democracies. Mexico is more socialistic than capitalistic and they do nothing for their poor - well they bitch about America being the cause of their problems with our drug habit, wealth, and guns (their cartels couldn't get guns anywhere else you see). Brazil I don't know and the others are large enough (compared to India or china) to call out. Frankly Russia is a socialist mess but they only have 125 million people. Dwarfed by both china and India.

Europe is the only place where socialism works well and most euro nations are small. I think that is a factor. Smallness creates an accountability that enables socialism to work.

Q

Cheezy said...

True socialism hasn't really worked well, in the long term, anywhere. Whereas the sort of social democracies that exist in Europe (and frequently get mis-labelled as socialism) can work well, and have worked well, in certain countries. And contrary to some of what I read about them, free markets and extensive individual democratic rights are intrinsic parts of these nations.

Anonymous said...

Agreed

Q