Hello Keith,
I've taken the liberty of changing the subject, so I include the
previous header.
Date sent: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 10:25:00 +0100
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: FW Genetically Modified Humans
Copies to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> The so-called underclass within a culture is a snapshot, a
> statistical artifact. In actuality, (young) people are generally
> moving out of poverty as they get older and people are descending
> into poverty in old age. I'm not at all suggesting that we should
> be complacent about this, of course. All I am saying is that it is
> not a static phenomenon with a fixed population. Of course, there
> are many pockets of poverty and ... these pockets may persist for
> generations, but this is not the same as saying that there is a
> permanent underclass over the whole of the larger society.*
I hope I have not distorted your meaning by cutting out a bit of
what you say. Let me say straightaway that I am no statistician.
What you say is a point of perennial concern to me, and I regret
that no one has yet responded to it. I fear that the reasons are
simple. Everyone knows that, as far as it goes, what you say is true
-- just as many (not excluding you, yourself, I'm sure) know that the
migration of individuals in large numbers between income classes
does nothing to rule out the existence of unacceptable disparity of
income, as between the partitions of that statistical abstract to
which you refer.
What I mean by that can be illustrated by a couple of charts I
produced several years ago from 1996 data in Canada. One of the
charts shows that, if you divide the income population by 5ths, the
richest 5th / quintile -- in which the income average for the top 10%
is considerably depressed -- earns almost 2x the income of the
fourth 5th, easily 3x the income of the third 5th, more than 5x the
income of the fourth fifth, and fully 15x the income of the bottom
fifth.
According to my figures, the threshold income for the 4th fifth was
just over $25,000 in 1996, (which means that 60% of Canadians had
to make do with less). Believe it not, to qualify for entry to the
richest fifth you had to earn exactly $40,000 or more.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the other chart -- which I call Social Pie
-- converts that data into income percentages and shows that the
annual income of the richest 5th was 47% of the whole, compared
to 3% for the poorest 5th. The three statistical artifactual fifths in
between earned just enough to take home 50% of total income.
That is to say, the top 20% earned close to 50% of all market
income in 1996, as they did every year for the preceding 15 years or
more.
http://www.ott.igs.net/~jmclaren/issues/income/
If memory serves, these are market income figures (after tax but
before transfers), which is sufficient for my point, whatever the
effect of transfers. My point is that the market system of
distributing economic wealth is rotten to the root.
I looked back more than 15 years, as I said, plugged in the numbers
for each year, and discovered that the average annual income in
each fifth did not fluctuate more than a single point in all that
time. Of course, when you earn not much more than 0.5% of total
market income (as I think does the bottom 10%) a fluctation of even
a fraction of a point can render individual class members absolutely
destitute, as can the slightest reduction in benefits or qualification
criteria.
In other words, annual income disparity in this country appears to
me to be a structural characteristic of the economy and not a
statistical abstract, despite the truth of what you say. And that's
my concern. The movement of individuals in significant numbers up
the ladder and down is an undeniable fact. So, too is the movement
of people across any of the income borders (deciles and quintiles)
that are convenient to monitor. But this normal migration has been
used, I think, to hoodwink Joe six-pack into believing that income
disparity is not a permanent feature of everyday life for a very
large number of people and that, as you argue, there is no
permanent underclass. The conclusion rests simply upon the
obvious fact that a good many of the faces in any one segment of
the income spectrum change over time. It does not meet the
obvious rejoinder that the division between income segments is
outrageously inequitable.
More important, the natural migration of individuals is used to
reassure the not-so-rich (who are indeed complacent) that poverty
and discrimination by financial class is not a sizable permanent
feature of our economy but, rather, a normal phenomenon caused
by the progression of some through merit and the failure of others
on account of their own personal shortcomings, or because they
have been victimised by social assistance and enervated in the
process.
The facts are not so comforting. At any one time, 60% of those who
earn any income whatever from the economic system in Canada,
take home little more than 1/4 of annual measured income, which
itself is probably a qualifier of no small importance. And each
quintile in 1996 represented something close to 22 million people in
this country -- assuming my spreadsheet doesn't lie to me.
What troubles me, therefore, is the fundamental market
distribution of income. Statistics Canada, so far as know, claims
conveniently not to be able to measure wealh, as I believe the US
does. But imagine, as I'm sure you can, the cumulative advantage
over time -- over a lifetime, or some signficant part of it -- of
annual incomes far above the median. Compare the situation of
those relative few with perpetual discretionary income surpluses to
that of those living year after year without adequate income, or as
one of the working poor, or as a member of any one of the first 3
income fifths who take in little more than 25% of all income, thanks
to the extra earning capacity of the bottom quintile.
I know that you know this, of course, just as we all know that most
people don't.
Income disparity in this country looks permanent to me. It makes
the system that generates it look grossly inequitable. The faces of
the poor and the working poor may change, but the dispairity, as I
like to spell it, persists -- as between income classes -- and it
multiplies year after year, for the lifetime of all who never achieve
or cannot maintain a level of earnings that provides them with an
adequate living, let alone a discretionary income. We need wealth
statistics to prove this, of course, but where are they? I hope that
your government does better by its citizens than ours does by
Canadians in this critically important respect.
At one time, I thought that anyone with a light in the windows
would simply look at what I call the Social Pie and realise that
something is radically wrong. I was badly mistaken.
Is it therefore accurate to denominate the financially
disadvantaged as a "statistical abstract" ? Maybe. But it cannot be
true that this measure of wealth and power, around which nearly
all our social relations are built, is the consequence of a few wealth
laws, as I think you may have suggested earlier. Quite the contrary.
This is surely the result -- the calculated outcome -- of the
protection of privilege by an entire economic system supported by
political institutions of our own creation -- not to exclude tax law --
which is designed to ensure a consistent pattern of wealth
distribution ad perpetuam. Change the faces, if you will.
Nibbling around the edges of such a system will do little to change
the look of the pie, a criticism I think one can fairly make of all
those -- bless them -- who are trying to squeeze such a relatively
little more from a fiscal system in need of radical reform.
I frankly don't see you as someone who would disagree with any of
that. But I leave it to those with the requisite knowledge in this
group -- there are more than a few -- to set the record straight and
bring us all up to date.
In closing, I found some ominous support for my personal conviction
in Jeremy Rifkin's latest: The Age of Access, pp. 230-1. So I'll
append it with judicious excisions. I won't explain access.
----
The disparity in income and wealth between the top fifth of the
world's population ... is increasing so rapidly that any talk of
guaranteeing universal access is likely to be greeted with deep
suspicion and cynicism by most observers.
According to a study conducted by the United Nations Development
Program, the world's 358 billionaires now have combined assets
that exceed the total annual income of nearly half the people who
live on earth. While Bill Gates is now richer than half the American
people put together, more than a third of the world's 3 billion
workers find themselves without jobs or underemployed, according
to a 1998 report of the International Labor Organization.
The result is that while the wealthiest human beings on earth are
increasingly preoccupied with entertainment and living creative and
expressive lives, nearly 1 billion other human beings are living in
poverty and several billion more are barely making ends meet. And
the projections for the immediate future are even more grim.
More than 100 countries, with a combined population of 1.6 billion
people -- more than a quarter of the world's population -- continue
to experience economic decline. 89 countries are worse off now in
terms of income than 10 years ago, and 35 have experienced a
greater fall in per capita income than occurred at the height of the
Great Depresion in the 1930s. In Africa the average household
consumes 20 percent less today than it did 25 years ago.
Worldwide, more than 600 million people are homeless or living in
unsafe and unhealthy housing, and the World Bank estimates that
by the year 2010, more than 1.4 billion people will live without safe
water and sanitation. Meanwhile, the top 20 per cent of high-
income earners in the world now account for 86 per cent of all the
private consumption, while the poorest 20 per cent consume only
1.3 per cent of the global economic output.
The reality is that Americans spend more on cosmetics -- $8 billion
annually -- and Euorpeans on ice cream -- $11 billion (in US dollars) -
- than it would cost to provide basic education, clean water, and
sanitation for the 2 billion people in the world who currently go
without schooling or even toilets.
The growing disparity in income between rich and poor is affecting
the developed nations as well as the developing countries. In
Britain, for example, income inequality has risen faster in the past
20 years than in any other industrialized nation.
In the US the Census Bureau reports that income disparity between
rich and poor is higher now than at any time since the end of World
War II in 1945. Today, the top 20 per cent of Americans receive half
the income in the country, while 50 per cent of American families
have less than $1,000 in financial assets. Middle- and working-class
families have been particularly hard hit. The median household
income in 1996 was 4 per cent below where it was in 1989.
----
Newsflash. Problem solved. Rifkin's out of date already.
http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2000/07/22/g8summit_000722
John McLaren
--
John McLaren
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