The world today is one that abounds with extremes. Not that it has not always been this way, it has; but it keeps getting worse. There is extreme poverty and at the other end of the spectrum, extreme and sometimes wasteful wealth.
It may not have come from him originally, but world-renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs subscribes to the belief that there is enough abundance in the world for everyone. It is a conviction that is also held by many others including Grammy winner Bono of the famous rock group U2 and famous Irish singer and activist Bob Geldof. They believe the problem is that the abundance is not spread around equitably. And a huge contributor to this inequity is people’s greed.
Sachs and others believe, though they have detractors, some of whom are also prominent economists, that poverty can be alleviated through aid – giving by the haves to the have-nots – rather than through the lending schemes espoused by the world financial organizations which only serve to deepen the dark hole that is poverty.
They don’t advocate persons giving away all of their wealth and donning sackcloth and ashes to make a point. There is nothing wrong with having a good quality of life. But they do support doing away with personal excesses; they feel too that governments, particularly in developed countries, would be better off spending less on military hardware and giving more to the poverty stricken in their own countries and in others as well.
It is to this end that they continue to lobby for poverty alleviation. Geldof’s Commission for Africa, Live 8, Sachs’s book, The End of Poverty and more recently Bono’s Make Poverty History campaigns are among the more memorable anti-poverty lobbies. Though they have worked to some extent, what is really needed is change and the ability to separate need from greed.
The answer to the question of how much people need in order to live a quality life will always vary. Since each person is an individual, each person’s needs would be different, or so we would expect. Sometimes they are amazingly similar.
In one of her shows aired this week, Oprah Winfrey highlighted a number of people who choose to live in some very tiny spaces – choose being the operative word here since they clearly could have afforded to have more room. Each of the people on the show was obviously contented with what they had, which raised the question of how much do we really need. We read about film and sports stars and singers owning homes in three or four different countries along with several cars, airplanes and other expensive toys. Do they really need all of that?
The present king of Swaziland, Mswati III, has some 14 wives and about 30 children; each of his wives has a luxury mansion, car and staff. How many wives does one man need? By contrast, Swaziland is one of the poorest countries in the world and it has the world’s highest rate of HIV infection, and therefore, the lowest life expectancy on the planet.
Author and artist John Berger said it best in this quote many years ago: “The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied…but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”
He is still alive today in the twenty-first century to see that nothing has changed since then or seems likely to.
