A Quote by Thomas Pogge
To make a proper moral appraisal of the prevalence of severe poverty today, we should focus not on comparisons with times past, when the global average income was much lower, but on a comparison with what would be possible in our time, given the current global average income and level of technological and administrative development.
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The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.
Poverty persists, essentially, because the people at the bottom - the bottom quarter and also the bottom half - see the gains from the rising global average income wiped out by severe declines in their relative share.
After adjusting for inflation, the average income of the top 5% of households grew by 38% from 1989 to 2013. By comparison, the average real income of the other 95% of households grew less than 10%.
After adjusting for inflation, the average income of the top 5% of households grew by 38% from 1989 to 2013. ?By comparison, the average real income of the other 95% of households grew less than 10%.
A comparison of the average professional baseball salary to the national average salary over the last one hundred years shows that for the first fifty years, 1920-1970, baseball players held a steady multiple of about 3.4 times the national average income.
In comparative terms, there's no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world. An individual American could make more money than 93 percent of the other people on the planet and still be considered poor.
The collective income of all these people - the bottom half - is less than three percent of global household income, and so there is a grotesque maldistribution of income and wealth.
In London the average person is paying 50 per cent of their income on rent. Just think how much better off people would feel if that number was a lot lower.
I think in some ways it would make more sense to have as a poverty level a relative concept and say, the level of poverty is that level of income or that level of consumption below which 10 percent of the people now are.
One of the most ridiculous defenses of foreign aid is that it is a very small part of our national income. If the average American set fire to a five-dollar bill, it would be an even smaller percentage of his annual income. But everyone would consider him foolish for doing it.
Over the period from 1988 to 2005, the income share of the top five percent has grown by about 3.5 percent of global household income, and the shares of all the other groups have diminished. The greatest relative reduction was in the bottom quarter, which lost about one third of its share of global household income, declining from 1.155 to 0.775 percent, and now is even more marginalized.
The monetary impacts of malaria from the household to the global level are significant. Malaria tends to strike during harvest season, rendering families too sick and too weak to perform the work necessary to earn a living. Malaria-stricken families spend an average of over a quarter of their income on malaria treatment.
My rich dad taught me to focus on passive income and spend my time acquiring the assets that provide passive or long term residual income...passive income from capital gains, dividends, residual income from business, rental income from real estate, and royalties.
I think it's terrible for people in effect to say that income from investment should be taxed at a much lower rate than income from labor.
Student debt in the US has exploded in the past decade. One of the reason is that the private costs of attending college have risen sharply, with public higher education funding having been cut sharply. Average public funding per student was 15 percent lower in 2015 than in 2008, and 20 percent lower than in 1990. The burden of the public funding cuts has been worsened by the stagnation of average family incomes. By 2014, this figure had nearly doubled, to 35 percent of median household income.
By some estimates, income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years, much higher than the average during that time span and probably higher than for much of American history before then.
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