The race toward wealth

Many would be offended if we say we are now living in a materialistic world. Or some would say, yes the world is, in general, but not all, and would hastily add they're not part of the many whose aim in life is simply to get richer. A few would vehemently disagree that the world, and the people in it, are becoming more materialistic in this day and age, but would then go back to their work and daily routines to earn their wages for the day. Okay, striving to eke a living to feed and house one's self and family is not materialistic. But what happens after that maybe.

The reality is, man, except for the very few who took vows of poverty, or those who live in caves and high mountains as monks or hermits, will always seek for a better life. And like the role-playing games which emerged and grew together with the Internet, everybody would like to "level up." The problem is, in the real world, there is actually no highest level — even the richest man or woman in the world would continue to strive to get richer. There is always something lacking — a new house, a second car, the latest smartphones, new hi-tech gadgets, more and more millions (even if you already received millions in PDAF rebates…).

We can debate without end whether seeking wealth is good or bad, and I don't think the question can be put to rest. But we can discuss the distinct difference between the word poverty, and its antonyms, wealth, affluence, richness. Some people will assert that the word sufficiency is also an opposite of poverty, but human behavior will prove that man does not stop at sufficiency alone — he will always strive for more. The best way to describe the dichotomy is to use measurements, a common scale of comparison.

Poverty is hard to define and to measure — different world circumstances will mean differently to their people. But we have to start somewhere and sometimes in the past, countries generally consider people living on less than a dollar (US) a day as poor. At least, in the US that's what they used. The World Bank also uses a similar scale US$1.25/day as extreme poverty and US$2.50/day as moderate poverty. Many countries, including ours, also use the concept of poverty line, measured in terms of families instead of per person. The percentage of the population below that line is called the poverty incidence.

While we can set the scale for poverty (arbitrarily as it may seem), there is no measure for wealth, especially on the upper limit. There is no limit to how rich one can become, and everybody above the poverty line will always claim they are poor, because they are, compared to others who earn much more. And those who earn much more will not compare themselves with those who earn less, but will toil each day, in air-conditioned rooms, to acquire more money. The top 100 richest persons in the Philippines will continue to work each day, as hard as the next guy, sometimes more so, just to earn more.

One bit of refreshing good news came out in "The Economist" last Mar. 12, 2012. The article, with the title "A fall to cheer," said "For the first time ever, the number of poor people is declining everywhere." Quoting a World Bank report, it further reported that the world reached the UN's "millennium development goal" of halving world poverty between 1990 and 2015 five years early. Surprisingly, this came despite the global economic crises which hit the world in the last two decades. The improvement, however, is concentrated among the poorest of the poor; there is a small improvement in the numbers among the moderately poor. Or maybe, there was really a good improvement, except that the number which improved from moderate poverty was replaced by those who escaped absolute poverty.

Even if  hopefully, mankind can eliminate poverty as defined against the standard of a life with human dignity, the search for more wealth will not flounder. In spite of the many emotional, sentimentalist, down to the very religious posts we see every day in social media, as regards to what is important in life; these are eclipsed by more number of posts reflecting acquisitions of better non-essential things. Cities everywhere are slowly becoming aware of a new kind of garbage — electronic waste, as well as the traditional ones, leftovers of human consumption. There is another ominous result — any kind of consumption, brought about in the search for more wealth, brings it a release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. We have to realize the inconvenient truth — wealth and consumption induce climate change.