Why you aren’t gonna be rich
But that doesn’t mean you’ve gotta be poor
I’ve never been very good with money. Supposedly lots of people feel this way, but in my case, it really doesn’t go anywhere. One day it’s in my account; the next it’s simply gone. Every week before payday I seem to be relegated to my bedroom, unable to afford anything the outside world has to offer, living off the few scraps left in the fridge. And where does it go? At the end of every thirty days, it’s uncommon for me to be left with anything to show for the previous month’s steady work at the computer in my office, aside from perhaps a few hazy memories from the pubs I’ve visited and — if I’m lucky — a clearer memory of something lovely, like a concert or an exhibition. Oh, and a book. I’ve always money for a book.
As I wrote in the first post of this blog series, my part time salary just gets me above the breadline threshold in Germany. I don’t receive a scholarship and have no other source of income right now except for my job, but I can always ask my mum for a bit of money if I’m really up shit’s creek. Naturally, there are many people who do live below the breadline — in Germany around 12.5 million, and in the United Kingdom 14 — who can’t just head to the Bank of Mummy when they’re not sure they’re going to make the rent for the month. And this number has been increasing recently. Austerity politics put into place after the 2008/9 financial crisis were one major contributing factor. According to Oxfam, around a million adults and a million and a half children were shoved below the breadline in the UK around seven years after austerity was foolishly chosen as the route to save the economy. A landmark paper from 2017 found that austerity caused the premature deaths of around 120,000 people. Austerity was by no means a political necessity, and many renowned economists both at the time and since have argued that it was the complete wrong way to handle such a crisis.
That being said, a brief look at the data would suggest we’re better off than in the past. The actual proportion of people living in extreme poverty is lower than it has ever been. Steven Pinker has been arguing for a while that, as a species, we are far better off, happier, more prosperous etc etc etc than we have ever been — and there’s a lot of truth in this. Nostalgically looking back to a past when people were better off is foolish, and few seriously crave a return to earlier days in the West—days when same-sex marriage wasn’t legal (any time pre-2000), or you could get done for blasphemy (1974 was the last time this law was successfully used in the UK), or women couldn’t vote (until 1971 in Sweden). But at the same time, there’s much to miss. While levels of actual poverty may be lower, the amount of people living around or just below the breadline is actually increasing; just as important as this, inequality in general has been steadily rising for the last forty years. This gif published in a piece by Vox shows how the top 0.1% of American families’ share of national wealth is almost as much as the bottom 90%, statistics which are kind of hard to fathom. The top 1% of America controls two-fifths of the nation’s overall wealth — just the top 1%.
Inequality isn’t just about money, either. In almost all of the most important things that are going to define our age, the poor will be hit the hardest, often while contributing to the problem the least. Take climate change. It’s agreed that the people who are going to be most affected by the disaster, the impending nature of which becomes clearer by the day, are the less-well-off. Agriculture is, naturally, an essential industry (because, like, we have to eat, and stuff). It’s also the industry that’s perhaps going to be most destroyed by changing climates, because of its obvious reliance on stable weather systems. And it just so happens that the people who will suffer from their crops being destroyed by rising temperatures, floods, and decreasing biodiversity are those who are already at risk of being pushed into poverty. The UN predicts that, if the climate disaster isn’t mitigated, by 2030 an additional 100 million people worldwide will be shoved into poverty. And remember those mosquitos, able to spread their deadly illnesses into areas they previously couldn’t reach because of sustained higher temperatures? Those who live in newly-affected places, and who will be unable to access the preventatives and treatments needed to keep them alive because these areas don’t have the means to deal with such a huge health crisis, will be the poor. And remember the talk of extending the Ultra Low Emission Zone in London? Well, white collar workers who need to use their vehicles to conduct business in their hometown could have to pay an additional £200 per day. This is after they were told to change to diesel because it was a greener, better alternative, only to be victimised after the fact when it was discovered diesel ain’t actually all that environmentally friendly.
It all comes down to class, but even if we agree that class is the issue here, there are qualifications to be made. If you’re Bangladeshi, Pakistani or black African, you’re much more likely to be poor in the UK. In general, if you’re from a minority ethnic group, with ages, family types and family work statuses taken into account, you’re still much more likely to be in income poverty than a white British person. And it’s even worse if you’re a woman: aforementioned austerity politics hit women vastly harder than they hit men for a number of reasons. First, women use public services much more than men, and are the majority of welfare benefit recipients. They also make up the majority of the public sector workforce. Both of these were devastated by austerity, and women then had to make up for many of the lost services, such as care work, by looking after elderly, disabled or young family members themselves, completely unpaid. The result of all this on the world stage? Britain fell to number 26 on the Global Gender Gap Report, lower than most of its European neighbours. Oh, and women were pushed into poverty, of course.
This is why the pseudo-psychological, charlatan motivational speakers who tell you you can be whoever you please and do whatever you want to do are full of shit — of course you can’t. If you’re a single mother working a full-time minimum-wage job, hit by cuts to welfare, and looking after your old, poorly father to boot, where are you going to find the time to start your own business? The point is that this inequality is built into the system in which we live. Capitalism only works if there are poor people and rich people. It’s not possible for everyone to be rich. Capitalism presupposes the existence of 1) a powerful, rich class that provides the capital for the mass production of goods which capitalism entails and 2) a workforce, which sells its labour for a wage, in the process creating profits for those above. This extremely simplistic explanation of two of the main tenants of capitalism nonetheless attests that not everyone is going to be able to be the next Elon Musk, because some of you are going to have to work in his factories (or, more likely, in his call centres and offices). Whether what we’re in is Late Capitalism or not (and actually, the signs aren’t pointing to the Revolution coming any time soon), some people are going to have to stay poor, or else the system won’t work.
So how do you solve all this? It’s a question as old as time itself (or at least as old as capitalism). A fleeting scan of the history of the twentieth century reveals that only a madman would argue for total equality in some kind of socialist/communist system. And yet, the mixed economies we all know and love aren’t really mixed economies at all: they remain functionally capitalist as their main goal is still, as a minimum, minimising losses, and really, maximising profits. That is to say, the accumulation of capital remains the basic operational level of the societies and economies in which we live.
But that doesn’t mean people have to be as poor as they are right now. There are ways of making the unfair capitalist system in which we live just that little bit fairer. Austerity politics was a massive step in the wrong direction, making our society less equal on several different measures. Fixing gender and race imbalances would be a good start, but isn’t nearly enough. If we don’t want to throw millions into poverty in other places in the world, those countries who are damaging the planet the most need to up their game and figure out how to tackle the climate crisis in a way that doesn’t disenchant and penalise the working class who are already struggling to get by. And before all of that, we need to look at the figures fairly and impartially, seeing that yes, absolute poverty is lower than it has ever been, but there are many people — the so-called ‘precariat’ — who are worse off than they have ever been. The Telegraph reporting that poverty levels are lower than they’ve been since the 1980s isn’t helping anybody and fails to highlight the real problems facing not just the UK, but the whole of Europe right now. It’s not a huge leap to suggest that the discontent caused by the Recession and failed measures to mitigate it was a significant factor in the political swing to the right Europe has experience over the last decade or so. Begin to sort out inequality and you begin to sort out people’s frustration with the current system, stopping them from voting for populist figures who offer a quick fix to all their problems and a scapegoat to blame. That’s not all that needs to be done to fix what’s going on right now — but it’s a start.
