Pradeep Goorha
Sep 4, 2018 · 6 min read

The selective affluence nightmare

Have you woken up sweating and so horribly frightened that it took several minutes of sitting up and breathing in and out before you could feel your fingertips? It has happened to me; and it keeps coming back — the story resuming exactly from where the preceding tranche was interrupted. Interrupted, because I woke up.

My nightmare is that tens of thousands of boats, big and small, are sailing across Mediterranean Sea from North Africa to every southern shore of Europe. The size of this African armada makes Dunkirk look like a teeny-weeny bedtime story you read to kids.

These floating objects carried men, women and children — almost all emaciated, many retching from drinking saline seawater, and some engaged into vicious quarrels for food. Northern shores were nowhere in sight. It was quite a horrifying dystopian picture. Some African had managed to steal powered boats and were doing better until they were within fifty miles of the southern tips of Sicily, Corsica and Grecian islands. Then it got a lot worse. Strong fleets of European coast guards’ offshore vessels and patrol boats were trying to round up every incoming boat, yell warnings into their megaphones, and eventually fire at them. It was beyond the coast guards to control the situation for they were outnumbered by thousands to one. In some cases Africans boarded their patrol boats, engaged in hand-to-hand combat, either got killed, or killed a few European lawmen.

Very unsettling, I tell you. The Armageddon of all Armageddons.

Some of our worst nightmares come true. Mine, I hope never does. But to the question as to why would the ghastly Armageddon of all Armageddons will not happen one day in near future, I don’t have a satisfactory answer. On the contrary, it apparently is very likely to happen.

And the reason will be the greed of the powerful and the affluent. Why do I think so? Well, let us talk about it.

You may think that extreme poverty has long been a thing of the past in the United States of America. Well, you have another thought coming.

The U.S. Census Bureau defines “deep poverty” as living in a household with a total cash income below 50 percent of its poverty threshold. According to the Census Bureau, in 2016, 18.5 million people lived in deep poverty. Those in deep poverty represented 5.8 percent of the total population and 45.6 percent of those in poverty, bringing the number of poor to over 40 million. That number doesn’t even take into account the number of homeless sleeping on the sidewalks or living inside their old rickety cars parked in church compounds or petrol stations. In 2017, that number stood at over half a million.

This? In the land of affluence?

Even more alarming is the disparity between the affluent and the poor. Take the County of Santa Clara in California, as an example. The county has the largest income gap nationwide; and it has also seen a dramatic surge in the number of homeless deaths in recent years. Contrast it with the fact that Santa Clara is home to Silicon Valley’s 76,000 millionaires and billionaires.

Surveys suggest only 5% of Americans think that anti-poverty programmes have had a big impact; 47% say they have had no impact or a negative one. And most people think that poverty is spreading — a view expressed by many politicians. In 2014, the current House Speaker, Paul Ryan, then chairman of the House Budget Committee, issued a scathing critique of welfare programmes arguing they “are not only failing to address the problem. They are also in some significant respects making it worse.”

So, what is the US doing about it? The poverty numbers being even more alarming in most other countries, what are those countries doing about it? The answer is a lot. But is it helping? In short run some minuscule improvements can be touted about. In long run, it is getting worse.

The need is to understand that as long as development is going to be treated as synonymous with the growth in the Gross Domestic Product, we will be into merry-making if the size of cake was growing by a certain percentage. And GDP, as we know, is measured as the total value of goods and services produced, and divided by the population. Then, upon getting there, we say that a higher consuming man is better off than the one who consumes less. We also say that the standard of living — a somewhat nebulous term — on its own is directly related to the amount a man consumes.

Since a qualitative parameter such as standard of living doesn’t render itself to easy quantification, we run to GDP to rescue us. But then GDP too has its own problems in quantification of intangibles.

All this is understandable, but what perplexes is that out of these indicators we blatantly derive what is obviously non-derivable. Since we average it all out per capita, we readily declare that the population (read country) is happier because we have registered a certain per cent growth in GDP, and hence the consequent growth in the standard of living. All of that obviously emanating out of higher consumption. Poverty numbers remained where those were. Where did that blip in GDP and Standard of Living come from? Say it in whatever circuitous way you want, a lot of it is nothing but the higher consumption of the affluent.

So if the size of cake increased by making more luxury yachts, Lamborghinis, mile-high towers in a juvenile race to win the height-war, that simply is a show of bawdy affluence of some at the cost of unchanging poverty of many? In 2017, Oxfam published a report, which claimed that the eight richest people in the world control the same wealth as half of the world’s population.

Am I the only one who sees it as a crime?

Many shouldn’t see it as anything to be happy about. And it is simply because life like this comes at more of a cost than we realise. We cannot be happy about the situation where 10% to 50% poor, depending upon which country we are talking about, didn’t receive any crumbs of that enlarged cake.

It is not my case to argue here that calculating GDP is a waste of time. My anxiety is that it is routinely used by the governments to laud themselves seeing it rise, and despair seeing it fall.

The problem lies somewhere else; and nobody is keen to state it as it is. The hard fact is that in our blindfolded race to consume more and, in that effort, acquire yet more products and services, we skew the ideal balance in the application of resources.

Since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain maximum well-being with minimum of consumption. This boils down to thinking in terms of effective resource application rather that maximizing consumption as the bedrock of all developmental activity. Further, the resource application should be measured in ten different tiers of income — from top 10 percent down to bottom 10 percent.

Besides, on the question whether we are certain we are taking intelligent steps, most of what we do isn’t helping. It is adding to the destruction of the planet and humankind living on it. I bring in thoughts of “Small is Beautiful” Economist, EF Schumacher in. He was very worried to see the cavalier application of partial knowledge for immediate gains. Going in for nuclear energy without having a clue on how its waste shall be disposed is one such example. Then, there also is chemistry inherent in the way we do our agriculture; its negative effects are enormous — some understood but not resolved, and some not even understood.

Any well-read fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the direction of maximizing well-being with minimum consumption.

Try convincing a politician on the merits of my edict — no matter where he is from, America or Mozambique. It will be derided as an ascetic’s rave hectoring in support of renunciation.

  • Pradeep Goorha
Pradeep Goorha

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Management consultant, writer and columnist.