Economics

Once upon a time, a new species came upon this earth. Didn't have too many special abilities to survive, except for its larger brain. However they formed communities and tribes and they survived. A large part of this I believe was the ability to work in groups - they could hunt larger creatures and survive against predators. Unfortunatly once they mostly settled down, they started to prey on each other instead.

The way economics works is a brilliant example of how we prey and abuse each other for our own personal gains.

A 'rich' person is one who has a lot of money. You need these magical pieces of papers to get food, lodging and other things. Assuming that the world has a fixed amount of magical pieces of papers (ignore inflation or other things). Therefore whenever you are gaining some money, someone else is losing money - a zero-sum game. So by extension, there are ALWAYS going to be poor people, there are ALWAYS going to be people who can't afford anything, and we like it that way.

Lets take a theoretical example. You have a group of poor people living in a country. They lack basic sanitation, food and water. While many people would hate to live there, and feel sorry for the people there, they are a necessary part of the economy - they can be given rubbish jobs for poor pay. If they were richer, they wouldn't want to do those sorts of jobs - so they shouldn't be paid much either, we don't want them to crawl out of that hole. So when people collect money to save children in Africa or whatever, they're not treating the cause, they're slightly treating the symptoms. And the economy doesn't want those causes to be changed.

While as technology increases certain basic things will become affordable, there will always be people desperate enough to work for rubbish pay.

And this situation isn't likely to ever get any better. Rich people like staying rich, and rich people spend money on things which gives lots of profits to richer people - while a poor person might spend the money on food, a rich person will buy items which are produced by larger companies and which have a larger profit point - think about how expensive a luxury car is - how much of that is the actual cost of the materials and labour?

Sure you could argue that wealth will 'trickle down', but lets take some real life values - a particular company had the following values last year:

Revenue: $ 65.23 billion

Profit: $ 14.01 billion

So, lets take a look. The Revenue is the amount of money that people lost to buy this company's products and services. The difference of course is the amount of money it gave to its employees in return for their services. The difference is still a significant amount - where does that go ? To the pockets of shareholders who are already very rich.


So we can see the economy as a partition between the richer and the poor. The rich absorb more of the world's money - both though buying/selling of services amongst each other - and by giving not-so-much to those who don't belong in this special group.


And we fight and bicker amongst ourselves instead of living as a society which cares for each other.


Llama