How much was Lynsey Hanley enriched for this? "Sponsored by Special Brew?" Why must every day be April 1st on the Guardian calendar?
Ms Hanley has previous:
"The increasing geographical and social isolation of the very rich, shut off in tiny paranoid enclaves, causes as much damage to society as the isolation of the very poor, cut off on visible-yet-invisible council estates. The report shows how, in an area such as Chesham in Buckinghamshire, only a quarter of households can now be described as "average" in terms of income, when two-thirds were "average" in 1980. If you're "lifting" people out of poverty at a time when others are both racing up and toppling down away from the average, their status cannot truly be improved because you are not making them more equal with others."
Wrong. Greater geographical and social isolation from someone makes it LESS important how your income compares with theirs. The weaker the connection between you and other people, the less it makes sense to base your feeling of poverty on their income. That's why the median average used to calculate relative poverty is only based on all British people, not all Europeans, all people who speak English or all people with TVs. Take the 2 million pensioners who make up a large chunk of her 10%. The extravagance of twenty-something investment bankers in the City does not "exclude them from society" any more than a German executive buying a holiday home or a Chinese Communist party official getting a bonus when targets are met.
The truly unfashionable view, disturbing the cosy three-party consensus in the brave and incisive way that Ms Hanley seeks, is this: while social scientists and journalists care about poverty relative to statistical averages of imagined communities, people without money just want more of it. Not compared to you, or compared to me, but compared to the things they want to buy.
Tuesday, 25 September 2007
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9 comments:
Greater geographical and social isolation, though, is combined with masses and masses of information, on the telly, in magazines, on t'internet and so on, about how the rich here and in the USA live.
This is a driver of e.g. people getting into unaffordable debt, or children getting bullied for wearing the 'wrong' clothes.
Genuine question, how do you think people without money judge what they want to buy, if not compared to what other people have?
Granted, information about what exists is always a key part of how people express what they want. If I'm hungry, I imagine sausage and mash, not just an abstract desire for food. That doesn't prove that the existence of sausages - the fact that other people have sausages - makes me poor.
Genuine question - if the wealth of the rich in the USA makes people here poor (because it contributes to their sense of isolation, desire for goods, information about what to desire), why not include their incomes in our calculations of poverty?
It's an interesting question. I guess that data tends to get collected for specific purposes, e.g. for nations to compare levels of poverty or assess the effectiveness (or otherwise) of policies to reduce poverty. Hence there are EU wide poverty measures, but not comparisons with the USA. The USA also measures poverty differently.
If you want sausages, and you can't afford them, and most other people can, that's a sign of being poor, right? All the more if you replace 'sausages' with e.g. 'fruit and veg'.
I think the fly in your (and Mrs Hanleys) ointment here Neill is more or less as Don says: Although rich and poor may be geographically and socially isolated, thanks to the ubiquity of modern media there has probably never been a time when the poor have not been more aware of what they are missing out on. As you say, the weaker the connection between people, the less it makes sense to base your poverty as being relative to their income. However, the problem is that TV, Hello! Vanity Fair magazine et al. all relentlessly focus on (and sell) the lifestyles of the very rich to people in lower income groups, thereby powerfully reinforcing that connection as a socially desirable aspiration and abolishing 'geographical' or 'social' distance by bringing it direct to the consumer. Thanks to the media, you don't have to actually meet Keira Knightly in order to know where she shops.
My thought about the 2 million pensioners and the investment bankers would be this: The pensioners depend on the bankers for their pensions, but there is no corresponding interaction. My question would be: What are the consquences for society if some people are allowed to become so wealthy that they have no need for the rest? Is this desirable? In this scenario does society still exist? Should it even exist? I personally do not have answers to these issues, but they are ones I think are considering before unequivocally endorsing christmas bonuses.
Finding out (by purchasing a magazine that tells you!) where KK shops does not make you any poorer than the moment before you learned that information. I am not richer for being ignorant of celebrity tittle-tattle, except perhaps spiritually. The connection with stars is sought out, not foisted upon people to impoverish them. I think this just makes words less meaningful. Real poverty - the absence of stuff - is appalling. But envy - what I think you are describing - is not solved when poverty is alleviated. That's why so many middle class people, reading about the stars, also feel regret that they do not share their extravagant lifestyles.
There is no such thing as being too wealthy to need other people. Everyone spends money, the rich more than most, and that requires them to exchange money with others for the provision of services.
They also need government, at various levels, to keep themselves safe from foreign invasion, the roads lit, their would-be employees educated and so on.
But "isolation" should be defended as a lifestyle choice. If it brings you pleasure to live in a gated community and hang around with other rich people on the golf course that's your choice, just as travelling people or Jehovah's Witnesses should be secure in opting out from allegedly "normal" lifestyles in some respects.
Poverty means a lot of things (which is unhelpfully confusing).
Ms Hanley seems to be working on a system of relative poverty - how much a household earns as a proportion of the national average. Though what geographical or social isolation of others has to do with my earnings, I have no clue.
Neill is (I think, feel free to correct) working on a system of absolute poverty. Inability to buy food etc. By that standard, virtually no-one in the UK is affected.
Then there is a third type of poverty which I think is what donpaskini is referring to (again, feel free to correct) and Ms Hanley may be dipping into. That of how people feel. The knowledge that someone, somewhere has lots more stuff than me. Again, I don't see the damage caused by isolation.
Existence and knowledge of such a people could be (and is being) argued to be damaging to peoples perception of their wealth - their living in a "paranoid enclave" seems pretty irrelevant.
Genuine questions (since they seem to be in favour and I think the answers might be interesting):
Do I suffer less poverty if I read an article on 3rd world famine rather than on celebrity shopping?
Do I suffer less poverty if I have a slow metabolism and only want one sausage (but am otherwise identical in income/situation to my two sausage-desiring friend)?
Very interesting discussion.
-Not sure about whether metabolism is the best example of this, but if you need (for whatever reason) to spend less on essentials like say food, then your disposable income will be higher (even if take home pay is the same). Hence the link, for example, between poverty and having a disabled child.
-The connection with stars is obviously foisted on people, this is a multi billion pound global industry in which some of the smartest and best paid people in the world constantly develop innovative new ways to get people to aspire to the things which they see that celebrities have.
People can and do swim against the tide, but it is particularly hard for parents who are faced with dilemmas like 'refuse to buy £120 new trainers for my child and know that they will get bullied at school, or go into debt to buy them'. That's also an answer to the question about whether you can avoid the effects of poverty by not reading about celebrity lifestyles - you'd also need to stop the people in your community doing so.
-On the effects of inequality, as opposed to absolute poverty, Richard Wilkinson's research is well worth taking a look at (his book is called the 'Impact of Inequality', also many articles). He argues that inequality is a major cause of ill health - largely due to people 'at the bottom' of the hierarchy suffering much higher levels of stress. Inequality causes higher rates of ill health even when studying groups where no one is living in anything like absolute poverty.
-Isolation as a lifestyle choice. Very rich people might still need other people, but have conflicting interests with them. For example, if none of your children, nor those of any of your friends' children, will ever go to a state school, then you'll choose a tax cut rather than investing in state education. Ditto healthcare. And the interest in other people who might be your employees is about making sure that e.g. employment laws are structured to ensure that you can make as much money with as little bother as possible.
In other words, isolation is fine as long as it doesn't harm others. But the evidence from everywhere from the USA to Africa is that the effect of allowing the very rich to isolate themselves from the rest of us and hang around together tends to be to entrench power in the hands of the elite and reduce social mobility.
Thanks for the tip. I'll look up the book.
It is legitimate for a rich person to desire tax cuts rather than extra spending on health and education.
What is more, he/she is likely to be outnumbered by voters (the beneficiaries of that money) who legitimately want you to pay more.
This is not an elitist point. It is legitimate for (e.g.) Sikhs to vote on the basis of who offers state funding for religious schools. Self-interest is not an illegitimate reason for voting.
A smaller proportion of humankind lives in poverty than at any point in history. This fact is wonderful. The secondary fact that hundreds of millions remain desperate is a cause for action. Real poverty, in Britain and more often abroad, is more pressing than the upset, however genuine, caused by teasing over an inferior brand of trainers.
Again, I suggest this (unintentionally) diminishes a real problem in the way that declaring a "war on terror" diminishes the word "war".
I'm not disputing that people vote based on self-interest, merely pointing out some of the consequences when the rich and powerful's self-interest runs directly contrary to that of poor people (rather than there being a common interest in e.g. improving the NHS).
Your argument seems to have shifted somewhat from saying that people without money just want more of it without comparison to others.
I would also prioritise reducing absolute poverty over pretty much anything, but I don't think that undermines the case for also taking action on relative poverty and inequality, and secondly I don't think that letting the super rich isolate themselves is going to do anything except harm efforts to reduce poverty.
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