Zoe Williams wrote this in the Guardian yesterday:
Poverty is not a naturally occurring germ or virus; it is anthropogenically created though wealth extraction. Any goal that fails to recognise this is not only unlikely to succeed, but can only be understood as a deliberate act of diversion, drawing attention away from what might work; in its place, the anodyne, fairytale language of hope, in a post-ideological world where all politicians just want what's best and a billionaire is just a benefactor you haven't met yet.
Having done so it lit up twitter, where the article was shared with enthusiasm, and enraged the right-wing commentariat. I have read some of the usual culprits from amongst their number and can summarise their arguments with ease. First they say relieving poverty is all about growth. Second they say growth cannot happen without the rich getting richer. And third, without using the term, they quite clearly refer to the economics of trickle down. This is the logic that if we all get richer the poorest will at least get some benefit along with the rest.
Of course they did not use the term; it is far too discredited for them to make that mistake, but the logic was clearly present. The usual cliches were rolled out. So, for example, poverty cannot be solved without yet more growth (and blow the planet) whilst it was very apparent in the comments I read that any form of redistribution was clearly to be avoided as part of any agenda on poverty. The tone adopted towards Zoe when stating these, apparently incontrovertible facts was deeply predictable: I don't give such material air space here.
And note what they also did not say, but which Zoe did. They did not talk about the carbon impact of the very wealthiest's consumption which might constrain the chances of those seeking to get out of poverty.
Nor did they talk about the fact that a great deal of wealth has nothing to do with ability, but is all about rent extraction - as Zoe knows - whether that be rents, or interest, or the enslavement created by advertising, or denial of access to basic resources.
And they did not also mention that growth is about more than materialism, unless you are a financier when that is the only way it works.
They also forgot to mention that if only all the upward transfers of rent stopped the downward flows of redistribution would need to be so much smaller to end poverty.
So Zoe was emphatically right. But she may have understated her case. Poverty is a construct and it is deliberate. And it is imposed by a few. And ending extreme wealth would help its eradication and leave the world a wealthier, better, happier and more sustainable place.
Zoe did a great service by stating the obvious that has been missed for too long. We need to stop any pretence that trickle down works and stop the upward flood of wealth. Nothing else will do.
PS I address how to do this in The Joy of Tax.
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Bill Turnbull hit the nail on the head on Breakfast TV when Lord Sugar described the new deal between the Premier League and TV as the ‘prune juice’ effect. Upon returning to the studio presenters he said (at about 7.30am!) ‘ I suppose it’s what you call trickle down’.
Trickle down was exposed as a shameless con years ago. It doesn’t work because the rich tend to invest, or hoard their money and not spend enough to make anything like a noticeable contribution to the real economy.
There seems to be a determined blind spot about the government using QE or money creation as it undoubtedly is, to invest in infrastructure and jobs. All the QE money and very low interest rate money is simply funding asset bubbles and speculation while governments cling on to the belief that handing hundreds of billions of pounds to the banks will somehow someday trickle down into the real economy when it is patently obvious this isn’t going to happen.
We could fund an effectively costless investment into infrastructure, housing and manufacturing through interest free money creation, either by a national bank along the lines of the Bank of North Dakota or people’s QE.
However, one of the most effective ways to get the economy moving is to significantly increase wages and hand power to the unions to effectively negotiate wages and working conditions. Significantly taxing teh rich would ensure a fairer distribution of wealth too.
Why would poverty be deliberate ? I was born to working class parents and through education I did OK and I have an OK life. I had free education and free health. At no point did anyone try to impose poverty on me.
You really cannot extrapolate from your case to the world economy
Sorry: just not possible
Frederick: Because when a Government CHOOSES to leave people, employed, underemployed and misemployed while simultaneously vilifying those on benefits, or ill and vulnerable and creating random, meaningless suffering through policies such as sanctions and bedroom tax then it is reasonable to infer there is something deliberate about it.
Why do so many in our society have no peripheral vision rather than a focal range of ‘my-corner’s-alright’?
Anyone who believes education and health are “free” is seriously mistaken.
In the first instance they may have been free at the point of use by any single individual but those services were paid for by the rest of society, you know that thing which according to the rabid librarians does not exist, through collective taxes and collective public spending.
Secondly, education and health care which falls under this category did not come into existance through some form of spontaneous combustion, magic, or the act of some sky fairy. Ordinary people, you know, those who cannot afford private provision of quality health care or education, had to fight tooth and nail to get them.
The fact that certain individuals have benefited from such provision is largely an accident of being born at a particular time and does not mean that just because one or a number of individuals have been, or are, “doing OK” that therefore by definition everyone else must be. Things change,sometimes for the better, particularly for the baby boomers who benefitted in the thirty five years after WW2, sometimes for the worse, as evident over the past three and a half decades or so.
The I’m alright Jack, therefore everybody else must be, mindset takes many forms. Sad to see evidence of it on display on the site.
That should read “rabid libertarians” rather than “rabid librarians.”
A lot of these comments are unnecessarily negative…why can’t we just all join the Frederick Party and follow the policies he recommends above? There is also a book to be written, tentatively called Fredrickonomics, showing that following the Frederick Way is the only viable option for humanity (or Fredmanity). In essence all is the for the best in the best of all possible worlds and no amount of satire can prove this to be incorrect. So there.
There has already been massive re distribution from those in the poor and middle income bracket to the 1%, mainly the 0.01%.
The economic policies of the last 35 years were designed to achieve this aim.
Increasing financialisation was the conveyor belt that produce the result.
The resources of this planet are limited, but conservation, sharing, recycling can preserve them while expansion into space is achieved.
We need to look past the “Punch & Judy” show put on by the politicians to hoodwink the masses.
The “real people” in charge, they have their aims and goals for the furure, which don’t include the masses. The evidence is out there. You just have to have to take it in on board and not bury your head in the sand.
On a positive note, I do think a signiifcant determined minority are starting to form that opposes the current corrupt system.
Poverty is the natural condition of humanity, not a social construct. Unless she means ‘relative poverty’ aka inequality.
There is no need whatsoever for piverty
We have more than enough to go round for everyone
That some lose out is a human failing in that case
And you are, therefore, wrong
Of course, there’s no “need” for poverty, and poverty can be eliminated in the modern world. However, in pre-industrial, subsistence societies, poverty is the natural condition of humanity. Which means, of course, that ZW is wrong: most poverty has not been caused by wealth extraction.
Your argument has no logical element to it
If poverty does exist now because of wealth extraction why wasn’t that always, at least to some degree, the case?
History might suggest that was definitely true to me
Well let’s consider a typical real life case study example.
The Tuareg people who inhabited the Western inner desert and semi desert regions of the Sahara most definitely fall into the category of pre industrial prior to the arrival of French Colonialists. They were a nomadic people whose individual, family, and group wealth was based on their herds and the number of animals owned. They were nomadic because the environment in which they lived was not suitable for agriculture and they therefore needed to regularly and periodically move their herds to fresh grazing to avoid over grazing a particular grazing area and and low it to regenerate naturally for future use. Their animal herds and therefore the source of their individual, family and Lloyd collective wealth depended on it.
One thing which can be said at this point is that they were by no means poor or naturally poor. They had a thriving culture, traded with each other and with other nomadic groups who were part of the larger society, and thrived in the tough environment in which they lived because they had cracked the most effective way of living within the prevailing environment.
And then along came the wealth extractors from Europe who decided to plant primary cash crops in the semi arid regions on the edge of the Sahara on which the Tuareg depended to sustain the source of their economy, the grazing areas of their animal herds. For a while the cash crops provided the wealth extractors with the profits they are accustomed to, whilst at the same time robbed the Tuareg of vital grazing areas for their herds, upset the balance on which their economy was based, and simply impoverished them.
The wealth extractors were not concerned. They expected the Tuareg to get with the program and act like proper civilised white men. Unfortunately, the area was not suitable for intensive agriculture and crop growing, which is why the Tuareg were nomadic and their economy and wealth depended on moving from one grazing area to another in order to have a grazing area to go back to. In a short time the area could no longer grow anything, cash crops or grazing. The wealth extractors moved on leaving the basis of the Tuareg economy severely impoverished.
Before the wealth extractors, the “civilised” industrial based societies, moved in the Tuareg had a thriving society making the best, most efficient and optimum use of the environment they lived in. After the wealth extractors moved in the basis of their economy was at best severely impoverished and they were, and remain, in a position of poverty compared with the period before the wealth extractors moved in.
That is not a natural state of poverty, it was and is and typical example, one amongst many, of what Zoe Williams accuratly describes as anthropogenically created poverty. In this case a thriving wealthy pre industrial society has been impoverished through the wealth extraction process by an industrial society. That is not a naturally occurring phenomena it is a result of deliberate action by one group to the detriment of action other.
Now, the question is, how many more examples would you like me to provide for you? I’m retired, I can do this indefinitely. Shall we talk about the Indian textile industry which was far superior to that of the British textile industry until the British moved into India and destroyed it because the British could not compete, throwing millions of Indians into poverty? Shall we consider perhaps more recent example in which thriving local economies and communities have been thrown into poverty for short term wealth extraction,like the coal and steel communities in the North of England, Scotland, and Wales (the British State’s periphery and expendable areas)?
Or are you going to stop spouting this complete and utter reality denying bollocks?
For someone of your intellectual calibre, Richard, your reply is disappointing.
You ask, Why not assume wealth extraction is always the cause of poverty? My answer is because there is a simpler explanation. That is, apply Occam’s Razor, which is a defining quality of rational explanation.
ZW has a unicellular brain; you are a creative thinker.
Dave Hansell:
OK, there are some examples of wealth extraction in the history of colonialism. But does the wealth extraction model explain all poverty, everywhere and always? For example, there were no wealth extractors who kept the Australian Aborigines dirt poor. All nomads, like the Touregs, were poor, absolutely poor. And in settled agrarian societies, even ‘the rich’ were often only two harvests from starvation. The industrial revolution changed that, which is where Marx comes in…
Anyone who can describe Zoe Williams as you do has no intellectual capacity I wish to engage with but is instead at best patronising and more likely sexist and bigoted
Please do not waste your time responding
Whether we are talking about the Tuareg or other aboriginal people living in a tough environment, they had a sustainable food supply, shelter, a thriving culture, traded with other groups within the wider collective, as well as as sustainable economic base.
They did not have to rely on food banks or struggle to keep warm or a roof over their heads. They were not, unlike the period after the wealth extractors moved in, dependent totally on someone giving them waged employment for a pittance, like for example the Romanian fruit pickers highlighted on Channel 4 news this week who have to give most of their wages back to their employer and are living in squalor.
Saying they were poor simply because you belive that to be the case does not make it so. So far you have offered no credible evidence to substantiate your claims or your argument.
They may have understood real wealth in fact
Really?
The rich and well off seem to be doing OK on the backs of the rest of us. It is not as if the basic arithmatic reality that all equations have to balance is a particularly difficult one to wrap one’s head around. Except of course for those who do not wish to be part of the reality based community and prefer instead the reality they construct in their own heads.
Tell you what. Throw the dart into the dart board, record the score, and the same number of examples will be provided.
Roger-how else can poverty persist without wealth extraction of some sort? Wealth extraction is at least a sufficient precondition for poverty. Marx new this which is why he talked of the extraction of surplus value. Now it is done with financial engineering which is not based on production at all.
Wealth is much more than ‘things’ you possess it is about the quality of social relationships, your cultural life and the social equity in your society.
There are many anthropological studies showing societies with much greater equity and collegiate sensibility than the one we have now.
I wonder if any of the right wing horde also noticed that the pope also poured a fare degree of scorn on the UN “goals” to which Zoe’s piece was referring – as I think Zoe noted.
Then again, I don’t suppose they care as he’s clearly already shown that he’s far too left-leaning to be a “real” pope.
Hello Richard,
Have you seen the programme by Prof Hans Rosling about poverty (see link). He seems to suggest that extreme poverty could be relieved in 15 years.
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end-poverty/
I have
I need to read reviews of it too
It was good
And I kep thinking the gloss was almost too good
I must watch this and hope it’s not based on any neo-lib theory of wealth trickling down! There has been a massive land grab in Africa which could ensure high levels of inequality even if relative poverty is reduced.