Tales of rich and poor: Links 11/17/2021

As America Falls Apart, Profits Soar by Matt Taibbi for TK News.

On the Duty to Obstruct: If conflict is the only route to a moral outcome, embrace it by Thomas Neuberger for God’s Spies.

How Wealth Inequality Fuels the Climate Emergency: George Monbriot & Scientist Keith Anderson on COP26 for Democracy Now!  Hat tip to Bill Harvey,

Make extreme wealth extinct: It’s the only way to avoid climate breakdown by George Monbriot for The Guardian.

The federal poverty line struggles to capture the economic hardship that half of Americans face by Celine-Marie Pascale for The Conversation.  Hat tip to Bill Harvey.

Over Half of Households Are Having Trouble Paying Their Bills by Doug Henwood for Jacobin.

Hope for Labor at the End of History by Steve Fraser and Joshua Freeman for Dissent Magazine.  Hat tip to Gene Zitver.

Rich people’s countries, poor people’s countries

Double click to enlarge.

This map shows national output (GDP) per person in different nations.   The leaders seem to be financial centers (Luxembourg, Switzerland, Singapore) and oil and gas producers (Qatar, Brunei, United Arab Emirates and maybe Norway).

The USA is both a financial and energy-producing center, ranking eighth behind those seven nations, but way ahead of Russia and China.

While China’s overall economy is thought to be larger than the American economy, that doesn’t mean that the average Chinese person is rich.

Of course GDP per person is not the whole story, either.  How the average person does depends on how wealth is distributed.  What the GDP figure shows is how potentially well off the individual person is.

LINK

Which Government System is the Best for People’s Wealth? on howmuch.

Not all white people are ‘privileged’

Via George Chidi and Mike the Mad Biologist

Wealth, hope, poverty and reality

Don’t forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.

==John Dickinson in the musical 1776

I’ve often heard this said.  Is it really true?

It’s common in the United States to hope for a better life, including a higher income, than your parents had, and to hope that your children will have a better life, including a higher income, than you had.

It’s common in the United States to hope for success in your chosen endeavor, which, if you’re an entrepreneur, involves getting rich, but not merely getting rich.

All or almost all entrepreneurs I’ve ever met hoped to accomplish something worthwhile and to be rewarded for it, which is different from the desire to acquire money by any means necessary.

I’ve also met people motivated by mere greed, but none of them that I know of ever accomplished anything worthy of respect.   Sadly, it seems to me that there are many such people in positions of power.

Our American culture emphasizes the responsibility of every person to earn their keep and pay their own way.  Those of us who’ve struggled hard to gain just a little are fearful of having that little taken away for the benefit of those who haven’t struggled.  Sometimes that’s a realistic fear, sometimes not, but that’s a topic for another post.

The facts about U.S. wealth and poverty

This video strikingly illustrates the concentration of wealth in the United States and the gap between the rich and the masses, which is greater than most Americans realize.  I came across it on the occasional links and commentary web log.

If you see nothing wrong with the degree of inequality described in this video, I would ask if there is any degree of inequality that would bother you.