Does anyone know why we keep people poor? I used to imagine it was to (somehow) keep the rest of us motivated, and I was once swayed by notions of meritocracy. As biologist, I found lots of similar situations amongst animals and still believe we are stuck with these genetic influences in our unconscious - this being most of what we are as social animals. The conscious-rational is still a small part of what we are. In animals the poor or subordinate can become the 'rich leaders' - clown fish even changing sex to do this, almost as if their genetics keeps some in 'reserve'. I find poverty something we should eradicate, but when I ask myself what poverty is find a complex.
My guess in terms of the Macht Politik is that the West has notions of needing to stay ahead, ensuring relative poverty for many, in order to have the ability to attract the best brains, innovation and technology development. This neo-conservatism doesn't appeal to me, but I accept its logic to some degree. There are things 'out there' to protect ourselves from -though eventually this logic collapses into itself as paranoid-schizoid positioning. Beggar-thy-neighbour economics has been around a long time - and one consequence of the neo-con madness is that arming China through manufacturing investment and 'Walmart' is treason. Transferring manufacturing expertise and raising wealth in China has changed the balance of power. I don't object from my own perspective, just note the inconsistency of the neo-cons. Our economics creates small numbers of very rich people and an elite of about 20% who rake in about 20 times the income of most of the rest. We are always told this is the only game in town and the nightmare of Sino-Soviet experiments is used to show us all alternatives fail. In fact these systems produced similar elites. Islamic banking, with its anti-usury, still leaves its poor poor. I have no wish to see everyone equipped as mega-consumers of the dross that helps burn the planet, or to find lager louts where I go on holiday and I don't go for 'wonderful human nature' solutions. Yet this system has allowed the human population to triple in my lifetime and broken every 'promise' of the better world to come. In all of this, a rich elite controls nearly all the wealth that we can put monetary value on, and they largely prevent us even arguing as though our democracies matter - we would like to do this but the banksters won't like it, the rich will take 'their' money abroad sort of stuff. Keeping people in poverty and without education has led to a lot of stuff (like loads of people) the planet can't afford We may have gone too far for a remedy, yet we have ideas and bright people who could change things if we stopped relying on the system we have. I think this involves eradicating poverty and a lot we currently think is moral duty in our basic thinking on fairness. We are being made serfs to accumulated money. We should, instead be accumulating social capital and finding discipline that is not enforced by need of making a living.
