| By Gavin Chait,
on 18 November 2006
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Globalisation and the global flow of capital are frequently blamed for inequality and poverty. "Surely," the argument goes, "you must be getting rich at the expense of all these poor, starving, hungry people?" This is usually followed up with the statement that: "the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer". Correlation is not causality. A person having a heart-attack may have eaten themselves to death. No-one is suggesting that the fit people running along the beachfront every evening have stolen all the health from the unhealthy people. The causality between wealth and poverty is not that the rich take anything from the poor; it is that the poor do nothing from themselves. The UN Report sited in this week’s CrisisWatch declares that (amongst other stories): the average US citizen has an income 27 times greater than that of the average Nepalese, whereas in 1950 the difference was only 19 times. You can, if you wish, get upset that the Americans have become so wealthy. However, the relative poverty of the Nepalese is hardly their fault. Nepalese have chosen a government and monarch who steal from them. That it is a brutal dictatorship is not the fault of the US. Regime change has not proven a successful stratagem and, unless Nepalese choose for themselves how they would like to be governed, there is little the US - or anyone else - can do about it. The same is true for Ethiopia, Turkmenistan, Zimbabwe or any of the other benighted spots that are mentioned in the UN report. It is not global capital flows that disable the poor. It is the poor’s failure to participate that ensures their increasing despair. In a similar way, it is hardly the responsibility of fit people to help the terminally obese get up and exercise. That is a task they must take on. If they don’t want to, then there are consequences. Without honest acceptance of responsibility, it is impossible to begin the process of economic development.
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