Wealth and Sustainable Development

Sustainable Development talks a lot about the poor, about the plight of the poor, and about the structure of poverty. What Sustainable Development doesn't do enough of, is talk about the rich. It is impossible to understand poverty without first understanding wealth.

The first thing one must realize is that in contrast to this era of economic globalization, it used to be difficult to become rich.

Yes, the fact that most of us will never attain riches anywhere near the level of wealth possessed by Microsoft's Bill Gates, Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim Helu or India's Mukesh Ambani, may on the surface make being rich seem a difficult status to attain. And on an individual basis it still is.
But when one takes a step back and realizes that for most of human history attaining such largess was not merely difficult but structurally and fundamentally impossible, well- suddenly you realize just how relatively easy it has become to be rich.

Why is that?

In the United States, where the Horatio Alger tales of young impoverished children who through the tutelage of older mentors become respectably middle class looms large, we tend to believe that the poor and the rich - or at the very least the middle class- are separated by work ethic. We still believe, implicitly, that the poor person, with tenacity, can pull him or herself by the bootstraps out of poverty. Never mind that it is difficult to pull oneself up by the bootstrap if one lacks a boot.

Even many of us who recognize the structural aspects of poverty, beginning with lack of adequate nutrition and education, often fail to recognize our society's structural relationship with wealth. In the United States where our wealth inequity is swelling, the rich grow richer not through increased efforts, but rather through tax codes that allow them to pay less in taxes (and effectively reap more of the social benefits), then their middle class and sometimes lower middle-class brethren. Billionaire William Buffet has admitted both that he pays too little in taxes and that he actually pays less than his working-to-middle class secretary.

It's not simply the tax code, which favors the wealthy in the United States. Farm subsidies push small family farmers both in the US, Mexico and many other countries, out of business while a handful of agro businesses reap the rewards. They further depress the market prices that farmers can demand for their products. The result is not necessarily reduced prices for the consumer - A 2001 study out of the Center for Integrated Studies at the University of Washington found that community supported agriculture in which consumers pre-pay for a season's worth of produce is often cost competitive with traditional supermarket alternatives. Under this scenario consumers pay the same or less, farmers generate more income, and the pressure to produce while pushing the ecosystem to the precipice diminishes. The loser are the middle men - the large agribusinesses which due little more than skim profits from farmers and consumers, yet due so in a way in which both consumer (in the form of decreased quality) and farmer (in the form of reduced wages) lose. This is just one example of how regulation, in the form of business codes and subsidies not only allow for wealth consolidation, but actually encourages it in ways that create an impoverished class. Poverty and wealth are not separate issues but rather are connected. Until we understand the existence of both, we cannot begin to eradicate poverty.