Privilege Equals Poverty

Published January 22, 2008

By Ben Silverman

We’ve presumably all gotten the line when as tiny children we didn’t want to finish our supper, specifically when it tasted god-awful, that there were children starving in [insert ambiguous third world region here] and they’d love to have what we have. Though we were never really able to figure out what the connection between the two was.

Now I am not disputing there are hungry people out there. We can see it on our own blocks, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture 35.5 million Americans were “food insecure” in 2006, up 400,000 from the year before.

On a larger scale, the World Bank estimates that the population of the world that is living in “extreme poverty” or on less than a dollar a
day is 1.5 billion. Expand that to under $2 a day and the figure jumps to slightly less than half the human population.

What I’m wondering is why?

Lets play a game, a multi-colored thought game at that.

Imagine a playpen ball-pit at Chuck E. Cheese with those Technicolor dream balls in it representing the power players in this scenario: power, the privileged, money, food. Add an outside force, a kid jumping in perhaps, balls start to fly all over the place and the pit is no longer even. But more importantly, for any rise of playpen depth in one place there must be a corresponding equal decrease in depth somewhere else-for every crest there is a trough. It all has to come from somewhere.

In the non-Chuck E. Cheese world, for each wealthy tycoon, there must be a far larger number of underpayed workers (most often migrant workers) to give the tycoon his position.

The ratio between the average CEO and employee’s wages has widened in the last fifteen years from 107:1 to 411:1-an increase of 384%. To put it differently, if the national minimum wage in this country had kept up with the average CEO’s it would currently be $22.61 an hour. (It should be noted that the greatest portion of this increase occurred during the Clinton era, not the Bush era).

As an extension, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the top fifth of this country’s most affluent (who I imagine all wear monocles) owns about 49.8% of all our wealth.

And this difference between the rich and poor is only increasing. Between 1980 and 2003 the richest 1/20 of households saw their income increase by 132%, while the bottom 1/5 only saw an increase of 24%.

A convenient way to figure out income inequality is a thing called the Gini Index done by the U.N. It’s a simple scale from 0 to 100. 0 is perfect egalitarianism and 100 is when one person owns everything, literally everything. Most industrial countries have a Gini Index of about 20 to 30 (though Denmark’s is 0.247). The United States is 46.9, which is comparable to Turkey, Tunisia, and Mother Russia. Worse yet, it’s been increasing steadily since 1972, rising over 20% in that time.

I’d admit all these statistics are pretty dull and tedious, but the point is things are not getting any better, have not for the recorded past, and if we continue in this trend likely will not for the foreseeable future.

Now is this just the way things are because that’s just the way things are. Such can be dangerous assumptions. There are always causes to lead to effects. For such things to be so pervasive, there must be a deep seeded, institutionalized error in the system itself that causes all this heartache. Not the wicked deeds of a few wicked men but the greater system itself.

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