Why I Think It’s OK that U.S. Citizens are Getting Poorer

When I was in college, one of my most influential professors was Pr. Koch. It was his environmental philosophy class that helped me realize that rather than be a high-power lawyer or businesswoman raking in the dough, I wanted to live on the land and grow my own food.

His estimation was that, given the earth’s population and resources, it would be reasonable for everyone to have a standard of living similar to the citizens of what were called at the time 2nd-world countries.

He had grown up in the Czech Republic and had been unable to return for decades for political reasons. In 1994 he was able to return. He had, he said, gotten a job offer so good he couldn’t refuse it to work at the University in Prague — $4,000 a year salary and he would only have to share his office with one other person.

In spring of ’95 I visited both him in Prague and my parents’ exchange student from the previous year Barbora in Slovakia. What I remember of the standard of living in those countries at the time is generous hospitality, ample food (oh, so ample — everyone in Barbora’s neighborhood thought I and my boyfriend at the time were poor because we were skinny, and did their best to fatten us up), and pollution from burning “brown coal”. The homes were made of wood and brick, and the general feel of the architecture and towns was similar to Germany. People used trains and buses to get around, as well as cars.

Barbora’s family lived in a place with decent population density, much like a suburb, yet much of what we ate they produced — we had sandwiches with peppers from their garden, sausages from a pig they raised and slaughtered, and moonshine distilled in the basement from fruit grown locally.

When I lived in Guatemala in the early 2000s, which would have been called a third-world country back in the 80s, the diet was less varied, and many homes had dirt floors and the walls were made of adobe. People cooked on a stove fed with wood they gathered themselves. Richer people could afford homes with tile or walls of cement block and cook with propane. Manual laborers could make about $2.50 a day, enough to buy 5 pounds of tomatoes (prices were cheaper, so $2.50 went farther there than it would here).

The U.S., on the other hand, using these older terms, is a 1st world country. Flying into the States from Guatemala, I am immediately struck by how rich this country is. The paved roads, the public toilets, the parks, the clothes, the cars, the Christmas lights…anyone who has spent time in a poor country can immediately tell how much money has been spent in the U.S. on infrastructure, and how much money individual households have access to on average.

When I hear people in the U.S. complain about billionaires or the 1% having too much money, I usually think, “According to your paradigm, YOU have too much money. YOU are the 1%!” According to my dad (I haven’t been able to confirm these figures by finding them independently), if you have an income of $30,000 per year, you are in the top 1% worldwide.

Now, I know lots of people that don’t make $30,000 per year, so I guess you can still claim to be in the 99% if you make less than that. I still think you’re probably doing pretty well compared to much of the world, just by dint of living in the U.S.. Maybe you live off of food stamps and don’t make much more than a couple grand a year because you found free or cheap housing — congratulations! You are getting for the price of a little paperwork more money than a Guatemalan laboring in the banana or coffee fields all day long.

I hear people say that our minimum wage is too low. I associate that stance with the idea that our standard of living is too low. I think our standard of living (as measured by resources used) has to actually keep going down for us to live sustainably on this earth!

My generation is the first generation of people in the U.S. whose finances are less strong than the finances of my parents’ generation. Instead of bemoaning this, I celebrate it. Hopefully it means our country is headed in the right direction to use fewer of the world’s resources! When I was in high school, the U.S. had something like 5% of the world’s population, yet consumed 30% of its resources (the actual numbers are hazy from time, yet I remember the gap was wide) — clearly we need to lower our resource use. If we instead try to keep consuming more and more, and set as our goal that all the 7 billion+ people in the world get to consume as much as U.S. citizens do, our world’s resources will be used up in no time!

People in the U.S. complained when they saw jobs being outsourced to foreign countries where labor was cheaper and saw it as a big problem. I wonder if these are the same people who complain that it’s a big problem for the 1% to be so much richer than they are. If so, perhaps they will feel a warm, fuzzy feeling if they realize that by these jobs being outsourced, money is leaving the relatively wealthy U.S. and entering the relatively poor countries where labor is cheap, creating more of the equality of wealth they so desire.

If inequality of wealth is a serious issue that needs to be attacked, I think the average U.S. citizen could do a lot more to divert money to people that are less well-off than they are. China and India alone have almost 2.5 billion people. If we are all to live sustainably on the earth with that 2nd-world lifestyle Pr. Koch talked about, U.S. citizens are going to have to concern themselves with using fewer resources and change what their idea of what an acceptable standard of living looks like. When I see people complain that our minimum wage isn’t high enough, and that we need to take some money from the 1% and redistribute it so that the rest of us can share in the wealth, I feel like we’re going in the wrong direction. Here in the U.S. we have more than our fair share, not less.

For me, though, having lived in Guatemala and seen how some of the non-profit aid organizations function, I don’t see a top-down approach of taking U.S. dollars and sending them to poorer countries and just passing money out as anything that will create a better world. Money is energy, and throwing it around will change whole communities in ways that could be positive or negative. For the average person living in the U.S., saving a dollar a day and then donating $365 at the end of the year to a Guatemala family could be a great way to make a huge difference to that family while meaning almost nothing to the person. The problem is, how do you choose the family? How can it be fair?

In the same vein, I figure all those rich cats with their billions of dollars might as well keep them and decide how they want to spend their money. Maybe it’s not “fair” that they have so much; then again, it’s not “fair” that we in the U.S. have so much compared to billions of people living in other countries. Some people have more, some people have less. I think the gap between the richest countries and the poorest countries is naturally closing as outsourcing brings more jobs into poorer countries.

Rather than focus on inequality of wealth as an important problem to be solved, I focus more on the best way to spend wealth. Some money spent leads to environmental destruction and degradation; other money spent leads to environmental preservation, education, art, or other yummy things. Rather than pass laws to limit how much money any one person can have, I would rather pass laws that promote the survival of the human species through protecting our environment. That way, any money spent is doing good rather than harm, whether it comes out of the pocket of someone with a billion dollars or ten dollars.