Comparisons

I am not someone who knee-jerks a requirement for two sides to every story.  Sometimes there is a story and some people who are idiotically yelling in the face of facts. To a large extent this is what cable news shows are. Sometimes things are very complicated and you can only tell parts of the story in any given setting, like history, or psychology.  However, there are times when adding the other part of the story is useful.

It has seemingly come to the attention of many people that there are some very, very rich people.  These people are so rich that they can't even spend all their money.  A person with the relatively tiny income of $1;000,000 a year has to spend more than $2,500 a day just to not break even.  Given a life expectancy of 100 years someone with one tenth of a billion dollars would have to find ways to spend that $2,500 every day for their entire life or get even richer.  At last count, there are 442 people at least ten times richer than that in the USA.  There are people so rich that it is almost impossible for them not to get more rich.

Furthermore, these very rich people have power based on this money and can use that power to change the system so that it is easier for them to make more money.  You know what?  They do that.  As a result these super-rich have been getting super-richier, particularly since Reagan.

Meanwhile, the income of your regular Janets has largely stagnated and so the gap between the very rich and the poor has grown larger.  Janet thinks this unfair and has furrowed her brow and is considering whether, maybe, if this keeps up, she might do something about it.  Maybe she'll write a blog post about it, or share outrage with her facebook friends.  Meanwhile Janet's weird cousin is building a bunker and stashing an enormous horde of weaponry, but that's a different story.

OK, some people being so rich they can't even spend their money and others being so poor they need help to eat is a bad situation that should be fixed.  Pretty much everyone I know thinks this is basically true and is outraged about the situation.

On the other hand...

In Rwanda the GDP per person (nominal) is $730 a year.  Now, because there are some richer people in Rwanda, most people there will have fewer resources than that.  90% of Rwandans are subsistence farmers.  25% of Rwandans don't have a clean water supply.  I think/hope you get the picture.

We have got to the point where there are three groups.  The nefarious super-rich, us, the deeply poor.  We seem to spend most of our time concentrating our attention, outrage, frustration, etc. on the differences between us and the super-rich.  I ask you, which is really the biggest difference, the one between us and the super-rich or between us and the super-poor?  I hope you got that one right.

In my opinion the inequality that exists in the world is more about us and the really poor than between we rich people and people who really are very rich indeed.  When was the last time you heard about how unfair that was?  When was the last time you thought about that?  Have you thought that what would be really important in politics would be some redistribution of wealth from the USA to Rwanda.  For some perspective, the GDP of Rwanda is about three times the US National Parks budget. 

The next part that we (and I certainly include myself) tend to do is come up with a whole list of reasons, excuses, and distractions to stop ourselves from sending three quarters of our money to Rwanda.  None of us are going to do it, let's be honest about that.  But isn't this what the super-rich do as well?  The sponging under-class of lazy layabouts throwing away their money on drugs meme is pretty much just that.

I am not saying that there isn't a huge, unnecessary, unfair inequality of wealth in the USA and that this hurts people every day.  I am not saying that you are an evil person unless you give away all of your money.  For Christ's sake we aren't Jesus!  Matthew 19:21.  I am just saying that we should spend at least as much of our time looking down as looking up.

In fact, looking down tells us for what we should be grateful.  Noticing the things that should make us grateful makes us happier.  It also can lead us to give to those less fortunate, and giving makes us more happy.