Sharing wealth, or sharing poverty.

Does money solve societal problems, or make the problems more deep rooted? Should our essential response be sharing our riches, or sharing the poverty of the poor ?

Comments

Shafi Patel Sharing riches is more efficient if done on a regular basis. NOT a one shot charity.

Aparna Krishnan Unless we share stakes, unless their problems of poverty become ours, we will not fight the essential fight.

Jagannath Chatterjee We should return to the barter system. That way one has to produce in order to buy. 

Chitra Sharan Sharing of poverty is critical more than sharing wealth, I think. Sharing poverty helps roping in the heart whereas sharing wealth at times can be just transactional and even establish hierarchy between the giver and the receiver. 

Aparna Krishnan Also we become stakeholders in the same system as the poor. And our fight against the inequities becomes more complete. 

Mark Johnston In my view the concept of money solving financial problems is an illusion. I lived most of my adult life in poverty, living at times in squats or slums like my parents and grandparents had done before me for at least some of their lives. I worked on farms or childminding, saving time for campaigning and protesting. Things became more secure in my late 40s but we still get by on well below the average income. My partner, whilst on a bicycle yatra in Rajasthan, heard many middle class Indians congratulating themselves on having done a little bit of manual labour in return for their meal and a bed and talking of the nobility of it. She pointed out that she had been doing manual work since before she was a teenager and that it was about survival not nobility. To me it is more important to live at a level of minimum exploitation rather than to become rich at the expense of others and then choosing who to help with our largesse. Poverty in Scotland is not, of course, to be equated to poverty in India.