Wealth & Poverty Love - Hate Relationship

This being my very first blog, let me share what I personally felt about this very unique love - hate relationship between wealth & poverty.

The definition of these two words means different things to different people. Off course, course text books may provide us with the most apporicate definitions, but allow me to interpret in my own definition.

These begins :-

Poverty and Wealth :

If we are to defeat poverty, then we must know much about poverty (not only its symptoms) and also about wealth.

We must identify the actual causes of poverty, and counteract those powerful negative forces. We must devise methods to create genuine wealth as a sustainable process of growth.

An Alternative Perspective:

In understanding the nature and causes of poverty and wealth, we must first discard some common assumptions.

• Poverty is not merely the absence of money.
• Wealth is not merely the possession of money.
• Poverty and wealth go far beyond the absence or presence of money.

Money can sometimes be adopted as a measure of wealth, a means to store wealth, and a useful set of symbols for the exchange of wealth. But money is not wealth, and the nature of poverty is far more interesting and challenging than just the absence of money.

Once you start with this radical or revolutionary idea, that wealth is more than money, and that poverty is more than the lack of money, then you can learn how to more successfully attack the common enemy, poverty.

This is not to belittle money. In our fight against poverty, money can be a very useful tool. Money can also be used to fight poverty and generate wealth. Remember, money itself will not eliminate poverty.

So What Is Wealth ?

If money does not equal wealth, and just adding money will not eliminate poverty, then what is wealth and how will it help to fight poverty ?

If we simply add some money to an economy (eg printing more bills), then we contribute to inflation, making the money worth less than it was. Inflation simply means that the costs of things goes up. If we just transfer money, from rich people to poor people (alms, charity), we do not create new wealth and we do not attack causes of poverty.

Any of us who have been short of cash feel that we know what poverty is. But the experience of individual poverty, which is alleviated by getting some money, is very different from the social problem of poverty, which a problem of the whole economy.

Therefore, the social problem of poverty is lack of wealth, not lack of money. For low - income persons, poverty is also how wealth is distributed through the society. If you add money to the system, you only create inflation, and that does not rid society of poverty.

The answer to fighting poverty, the social problem, then, is not to add money but to create or generate wealth; that is why wealth generation or creation is far more important, not merely income generation.

You can do three things with wealth :

1. (1) consume it,
2. (2) store it, and
3. (3) invest it.

I will leave today discussion here and allows some thought process to be exercise before proceeding further.

In my next blog, we will look deeper into the deeper issues of Wealth & Poverty.