The rich and the poor

When a globally renowned organization such as Oxfam releases a study which covers an equally and widely debated issue such as the worldwide distribution of wealth, expect a barrage of dissenting opinions on the matter, followed by a battery of counter arguments for and against it.

The dissent ranges from a "too simplistic" comment to a full denial of the report, further confusing the wider sector of non-economists in the population.  When it comes to wealth, opposing sides seem to guard their positions passionately.  Except the poor.

In its forecast, Oxfam said that in the next few years, the world's wealthiest 1% will soon hold more net wealth than the other 99% put together.  Simply put, if 100 persons own P100, it is distributed in such a way that only one man gets P50 or more while the remaining 99 gets the other P50 or less.  Assessing it even closer, it gets worse, because we could not expect the less than P50 to be equally divided among the 99 - even in that part fewer people will get the bulk of what is left, leaving minuscule amounts to the majority.  And this is not a hypothetical proposition, this is the ugly truth.

But while the situation is grossly anomalous to say the least, there seems to be little reaction from the other sectors of the world's societies, with the arguments left to economic circles, world business leaders, and development and charitable institutions.  Maybe people have grown impervious to the status quo and have resigned to accept that will always be the case, regardless of what they say or do about it.  Even governments justify the seemingly immovable disparity as "structural realities" and hence, difficult to address, at least in our lifetime.  It doesn't help much that we have governments that have shorter sights because of political realities of term limits.

No, I'm not advocating monarchies or dynasties but I'm simply saying it is difficult, not to mention uninteresting, to solve a problem that may take more than a lifetime, or generations to address.  The present is more demanding, and fulfilling.

But the world must, if mankind intends to remain to exist, because everything is finite and will eventually come to an end.  Whether it's by a catastrophic geological or astronomical event, or the earth reaching its carrying capacity, or the eschatologies of most, if not all of the world's religions, it is inevitable that this world, as we know it, will come to an end.  The usual denial that all of us have is we say that it will never happen in our lifetime, in spite of the fact that majority of the world's religions, especially the Abrahamic ones (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) profess that it may happen anytime, even in the next second.

One needs only to look closer to home, in the past half a century, to see that we have been facing the same problems all these decades and nothing seems to change.  You get hold of a Philippine medium-term plan from the time of Marcos or before and you will read the second major goal of each plan is to address "unequal distribution of wealth."  Eradication and/or alleviation of poverty has always been first.  It's heartening to note, that today, people are more aware of the second, which is why we are focusing on being "inclusive" nowadays.

Whose job is it?  Many will say - the government's!  Let's not kid ourselves - only the rich get elected in a democratic government (generally).  Even in central economies, the top officials belong to the wealthy.  So if there is any solution to this societal gap, it will have to come from the 1%.  The remaining majority who are poor are just too busy striving to survive, to even think why they are left eating bread crumbs from those who don't eat bread in the first place.