would anyone like to discuss the meaning of the following statement?

TruckerT

"The poorest 10% in the UK today are richer than all but the richest 1% in England 300 years ago"

TruckerT

chewmylegoff

PasturesNew wrote: »

It's a statement made by some kn0b who thinks slumming it means keeping the Bentley for more than one year and only having 2 main homes and 3 holiday homes.

yeah generali, stick your bentley up your bottom!

michaels

chewmylegoff wrote: »

yeah generali, stick your bentley up your bottom!

Hmm...stones, glass house, perhaps we should open a book on who earns more, Generali or Chewie?!

ILW

I would suspect that someone in the poorest 10% has more posessions, food, heat and shelter than 90% of the population did 300 years ago.

TruckerT

ILW wrote: »

I would suspect that someone in the poorest 10% has more posessions, food, heat and shelter than 90% of the population did 300 years ago.

Yes, but today's poorest 10% probably feel just as hard done by as the poorest 10% felt in 1713.

Richness is not an absolute figure - it's a relative one.

TruckerT

ILW

TruckerT wrote: »

Yes, but today's poorest 10% probably feel just as hard done by as the poorest 10% felt in 1713.

Richness is not an absolute figure - it's a relative one.

TruckerT

Wish someone had told Brown that when he kept banging on about (relative) poverty and trying to solve by chucking cash at people.

TruckerT

ILW wrote: »

Wish someone had told Brown that when he kept banging on about (relative) poverty and trying to solve by chucking cash at people.

It was the banks who chucked cash at people - Brown had no choice (so we are told...) but to refund the banks' losses out of taxpayers' money.

TruckerT

ILW

TruckerT wrote: »

It was the banks who chucked cash at people - Brown had no choice (so we are told...) but to refund the banks' losses out of taxpayers' money.

TruckerT

I was not referring to the banks. More the army of low grade scroungers that seem to amount to about half the population.

prowla

TruckerT wrote: »

"The poorest 10% in the UK today are richer than all but the richest 1% in England 300 years ago"

TruckerT

It means that all the money in the world couldn't by a HD TV, a beemer, and an iPhone, and that they couldn't eat chips and pineapples and drink coke.

CLAPTON

Only people who have never seen real poverty say that poverty is all 'relative'.

It is true that some people are so eaten up by envy that they can't enjoy the enormous opportunities offered by our riches.

Sadly too, the relative poverty lobby never discuss the nature of the process that has creates our wealth and so condemn many in the poorest countries to continuing un-necessary real poverty.
Doubtless they justify this by noting that as poverty is 'relative', that a starving person is happy in the knowledge that his neighbour is also starving.

TruckerT

CLAPTON wrote: »

Only people who have never seen real poverty say that poverty is all 'relative'.

I didn't say that poverty was relative - I said richness was relative

It is true that some people are so eaten up by envy that they can't enjoy the enormous opportunities offered by our riches.

I don't understand that sentence.

Sadly too, the relative poverty lobby never discuss the nature of the process that has creates our wealth and so condemn many in the poorest countries to continuing un-necessary real poverty.

This thread is entirely about the creation of wealth. It is the multi-national companies and the third-world warlords who prevent the poorest people from getting their fair share.

Doubtless they justify this by noting that as poverty is 'relative', that a starving person is happy in the knowledge that his neighbour is also starving.

As soon as somebody has enough food, they will start complaining about not having a smartphone - that's capitalism

TruckerT...