I just learned about this site which seems like a nice tool for starting conversations about wealth distribution and class. It doesn’t address stored wealth (like, I can imagine college students who don’t have jobs and are supported by their rich families and stand to inherit a lot putting in their income to happily discover that they aren’t rich), but it still seems like a useful intervention. Also, I just stumbled across this new comic book about the economic crash. I read it cover to cover in the bookstore cafe, thinking about whether it would be good to assign to my Poverty Law students since it both covers a lot of ground in terms of economic policy and describes social movement resistance work.
3 Replies to “Find out how rich you are”
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hi Dean and others,
i was wondering what you think about what this site suggests about global wealth redistribution. (like how i can spend $8 on 15 organic apples or 25 fruit trees in Honduras) does it actually make sense? i typed in what i thought was poverty salary/(twice what i make now working for Americorps) for the U.S. ($20, 000), it came out to be 11.6% wealthiest percentile in the world. how does that actually translate when in the u.s., that money probably wouldn’t cover healthcare, food security, transportation, etc., which i could have in many other countries** for a lot less money? if i can’t afford organic food in the u.s., what the website seems to be telling me is i should move to Honduras so me and many others can live in an orchard.
then there’s the additional problem of how it doesn’t weigh the politics and issues of for example, sending $2, 400 to an Angolan village for the “schooling” of an entire generation of children. what schooling? how so? does this support the people of the village or just further the hierarchy of those with educational degrees over people just as knowledgeable without them?
i’m asking because i think that you and others out there probably know more than i do about how an anti-globalization, anti-capitalist and/or resilience model could push back against the framework of the site. i’m questioning not to oppose redistribution/reparations, but b/c i think the site seems to carry over some neoliberal ways of thinking.
-c
**the site measures wealth by “country” (AKA state), but i think more viable models may be looking at global classes, or some other framework that’s transnational and local, rather than the sort of false political boundary that is assumed to be a “country”.
Hi C,
Yes, I agree the commentary on that site is really simplistic and the methods of calculating don’t take tons of stuff into account. It feels like the site is doing a very limited intervention to help demonstrate the global wealth divide, which I think people in the US really need to think about, but the site doesn’t do much more than that. It doesn’t address how we need systemic change to redistribute wealth, how the long term theft of land, labor and resources produces global disparities in life chances. I think the site is a pretty limited resource, but hopefully a conversation starter. I’ve been thinking a lot about how although I also give money to individual people who ask me and to prisoners, I mainly focus on giving money away to organizations that are working to build bottom up resistance that is sustainable and system-changing. That website doesn’t really offer us a theorization of change that could help us understand how redirecting resources can be part of tranforming the conditions of poverty and wealth that the site tries to draw attention to. I hope that the conversations on Enough are trying to take up more of that work. I really like what you said at the end about trying to understand global wealth distribution in a way that isn’t limited to countries since condition within countries are so wildly disparate and since, especially here where I live in the US, we have internally colonized populations, migrant populations, and other arrangements that mean that talking about the US as one homogeneous “rich” population can obscure more than it reveals.
Thanks for reading and commenting! Glad to be in conversation with you.
Dean
So today, I decided that my leg/knee is doing well enough that it makes sense for me to venture out, to do something besides go to work (and go to a movie for Tracie’s birthday.) I’m going to try to find, and check out, and participate in the Occuply Asheville manifestation. I’ve been thinking about how the idea of the 99% is useful, but for folks like me who have some wealth, that it maybe obscures some reality of our responsibility and could be a way of avoiding accountability. I was thinking: where am I in the 99%. It is funny you can find lots of stuff on the web that talks about how much wealth is in what percentile, but it is harder to find real dollar amounts. Knowing that the “next 19%” owned about 50% of the financial wealth in the US is a little abstract to me. What does owning 50% of the financial wealth look like? Owing a jet, owning a house, owning $100,000 in stock, owning a small business? I found the following link kinda of funny because it is from the Wall Street Journal and it is from 2007 before the financial meltdown, but it at least had some dollar amounts. http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2007/02/01/rich-o-meter-20/
I know that there are some working groups w/n Occupy Asheville, will I be brave enough to join or help start a people with some wealth working group? I guess we’ll find out.