It is easy to have anxiety in an uncertain world, especially if one is facing unemployment in the economic downturn, which can put enormous pressures on family relationships.
But an unusual article by Ian Birrell, published in the London Evening Standard (4 January 2011), highlighted what was going right in the world at the beginning of the year. ‘Every night an estimated 925 million people go to bed hungry, a depressingly high figure. But this is 98 million fewer than the previous year, despite a rising global population…. Better nutrition is helping the world become healthier. Infant mortality rates have more than halved during my lifetime….. The number of people living on less than a dollar a day has more than halved in 20 years, while average incomes are at their highest level in history.’
A similar point was made by Matt Ridley in The Times (29 December 2010): ‘Away from Europe and North America, the world was booming this year. China and India, with 40 per cent of the world’s population, achieved roughly 10 per cent growth between them, and Africa 5 per cent. Moreover, this boom, because it is happening in poor countries, is rapidly reducing poverty.’ The headline read: ‘Things are getting much better - honest’.
Meanwhile Bronwen Maddox, Times columnist and the new editor of Prospect magazine, has also declared her optimism as the world’s population approaches seven billion. In her first Prospect editorial she wrote: ‘For all the turmoil, the world is getting richer (even if the Euro zone isn’t). Much of the benefit is going to the poorest.’
It is good to be reminded of these perspectives at a time when students take to the streets in England to protest against the tripling of university fees, millions endure unemployment, prices have shot up in the shops, and bankers still receive envy-inducing, indeed anger-inducing, bonuses.
It is easy to feel that, in our corner of the world, things are getting worse; that a new potentially dangerous class war is opening up between the haves and have-nots; that there are too many fats cats when most are having to tighten their belts.
Will Hutton, in his new book Them and Us, quotes J P Morgan who believed that top managers should earn no more than 20 times the lowest-paid workers in their businesses. Yet today’s ratios of executive pay to average earnings are 81:1 in the UK and 300:1 in the USA. This undermines David Cameron’s advocacy of a happiness or wellbeing index for society: the most contented societies are the ones with the least differentials between rich and poor.
Of course we all need enough income for sustainable living, a ‘living wage’. And this varies according to circumstances: number of dependents and cost of living, for instance. Yet, in order to achieve a reasonable income thanks to a university education, today’s young people are also encouraged into a culture of debt, with levels of student loans that make mortgage down payments impossible for many.
‘The poor you will have with you always,’ said Jesus Christ in one of his most enigmatic statements. Perhaps he was simply being realistic: there will always be disparities in income. But a belt-tightening society can have one of two effects on the human spirit. Either it leads to anger and violence. Or it leads to a deeper sense of empathy for the plight of others, what Karen Armstrong calls ‘the compassionate life’. It also focuses for each of where the roots of satisfaction in life really lie: in acquisition and material wealth, or in our sense of meaning in life and care and support for one another, often rooted in our faith traditions.
The writer is the author of ‘Trust and Integrity in the Global Economy’ and a coordinator in the UK of Caux Initiatives for Business.
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