{"id":18665,"date":"2013-01-20T10:43:23","date_gmt":"2013-01-20T15:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=18665"},"modified":"2013-01-20T10:43:23","modified_gmt":"2013-01-20T15:43:23","slug":"oxfam-and-the-top-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/01\/20\/oxfam-and-the-top-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Oxfam and the top 1%"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Oxfam is publicly blaming and shaming the top 1% of income-earners for their evil money-grubbing ways that deprive the worst-off and make poverty worse in developing countries. <a href=\"http:\/\/theviewfromcullingworth.blogspot.co.uk\/2013\/01\/why-oxfam-is-wrong.html\" target=\"_blank\">Simon Cooke<\/a> explains why they&#8217;re wonderfully, gloriously wrong:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<p><em>&#8220;Concentration of resources in the hands of the top 1% depresses economic activity and makes life harder for everyone else &mdash; particularly those at the bottom of the economic ladder.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And that top 1% isn&#8217;t you and me we&#8217;re led to believe &mdash; it&#8217;s those evil billionaire capitalists who are stealing the very bread from the mouths of the starving children. Let&#8217;s leave aside the fact that poverty is largely unrelated to inequality &mdash; people do not become rich by making others poor, however often Oxfam want to pretend that this is so. Instead <a href=\"http:\/\/theviewfromcullingworth.blogspot.co.uk\/2011\/11\/so-were-1-after-all-or-maybe-2.html\" target=\"_blank\">let&#8217;s remind ourselves<\/a> who the 1% are in terms of world development and poverty:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The truth is that the entry level income for the <a href=\"http:\/\/finance.ninemsn.com.au\/newsbusiness\/motley\/8371350\/attention-protestors-youre-probably-part-of-the-1\" target=\"_blank\">world&#8217;s top 1% of earners<\/a> is:<\/em><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><em>$34,000<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>That&#8217;s it, in real money not a great deal more than \u00a320,000 a year gets you into the 1% club &mdash; sits you among the world&#8217;s filthy rich, among those to blame for all the sins and evil of the world. Capitalist scum.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Most of you reading this blog are in the top 1% sucking up all those resources &mdash; depriving the poor in Africa and elsewhere of the chance to grow, to get out of poverty.<\/p>\n<p>Except you&#8217;re not. Sit back, put a smile on you face &mdash; punch the air with joy. You and me &mdash; capitalists both &mdash; have sat getting a little richer for thirteen years while a billion folk have escaped absolute poverty. All the international trade, all those businesses and those business folk filling the posh seats in aeroplanes flitting across the world &mdash; they&#8217;ve done that, they&#8217;ve lifted those people out of poverty.<\/p>\n<p>Oxfam are wrong. Neoliberalism is making all the world richer. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.un.org\/en\/development\/desa\/publications\/mdg-report-2012.html\" target=\"_blank\">Even the UN<\/a> celebrates that neoliberal success:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>&#8220;For the first time since records on poverty began, the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen in every developing region, including sub-Saharan Africa. Preliminary estimates indicate that the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 per day fell in 2010 to less than half the 1990 rate&#8230;&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This is what capitalism does. Isn&#8217;t it wonderful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oxfam is publicly blaming and shaming the top 1% of income-earners for their evil money-grubbing ways that deprive the worst-off and make poverty worse in developing countries. Simon Cooke explains why they&#8217;re wonderfully, gloriously wrong: &#8220;Concentration of resources in the hands of the top 1% depresses economic activity and makes life harder for everyone else [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,28],"tags":[744,91,51,691,315],"class_list":["post-18665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-media","tag-charity","tag-poverty","tag-pr","tag-unitednations","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4R3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18665"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18668,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18665\/revisions\/18668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}