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  issue #77  posted 8 / 6 / 2024             
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Flaunting Wealth in Poor India 

in the news: On July 14, Anant Ambani, part of an extremely wealthy family which controls Reliance Industries--India's most valuable company--gets married in an incredible $600 million extravaganza. The event is covered in the July 20 issue of the Economist. After describing all of the celebrities in attendance, concerts,  glitz, etc, the article notes this family's fortune stands at $122 billion. It concludes by suggesting "the lavish family celebrations"  make "them look disconnected from India's economic and social reality."  

commentary and analysis by Stephen P. Cook, Managing Director, project Worldview:  This last sentence is quite an understatement! Nine months earlier The September 2023 Global Poverty Update by the World Bank revealed India has 750 million people who live at or below the $3.65 poverty line--meaning they subsist on no more than $3.65 per day. This is 40% of the world's 1.88 billion poor. Meanwhile, in April, an Outreach International report says that, according to the Harvard Business Review, the wealthiest 10% of people in India hold 77% of the nation’s wealth. It also states that as of 2023, there were 119 billionaires in India, whose wealth continues to grow at disproportionate rates."  

I wish to apologize in advance for the (at times)  "cold and analytical" nature of what follows. What I'm writing about is full of quite opposite feelings: often wanton, joyous celebration associated with the wealthy spending money, and what can be tragic feelings of hopelessness and despair of those in extreme poverty. 

The two worldview themes that are involved in the stark contrast between "have nots" and "haves" are

#24A  Struggling With A Basic Need: Sustenance  

and #43   Seeking Wealth & Power.

Another relevant pair of themes -- framed in terms of a choice-- is : 

 23B Enoughness  and                                          #26B  More is Better Mentality / Abundance   (which together define choice #45.)

The above "in the news" --and related stark portrayal of economic inequality, its consequences and potential solutions-- can also be discussed by involving these additional themes:

16B  Golden Rule, Village Ethic of Mutual Help

#42   Ethical Orientation   and 

#21B Service to Others  

on one hand, and on the other:

#28A   Hedonistic Orientation  

#204A Freedom From Limits  

and #36A Cynicism

My own thinking about economic inequality and its consequences can be traced to the famine in Ethiopia in 1984. Out of this came a contribution I made to a philosophy called eco-sharing. The considerations and arguments for and against this are described and outlined in my 1990 book Coming of Age in the Global Village. 

Here is a summary:

ecosharing -- an environmental ethic for people to live by: that their own impact on the Earth’s biosphere be limited to no more than their own fair ecoshare. An ecoshare is determined by overall assessment of the human impact on the biosphere, computer models of its future condition, and necessary limits imposed by sustainability criteria. The book Coming of Age in the Global Village (published in 1990) sought to quantify an "ecoshare" by linking it to average world per capita income and energy use.  

A chapter "Kings and Lamentations" in that book presents several examples of extreme displays of wealth put side by side with stories of abject poverty.  

Societies in which the gap between "haves" and "have nots" is large and growing can be lived as potentially unstable. In fact, a relatively low measure of inequality can be viewed as both an  indicator of societal stability and its  resiliency.  

I have not just focused on describing a problem, but have sketched a solution. Most notably, in chapter 6 of my 2022 book Choices We Make in the Global Village, I offer a section titled "Reworking the Market System to Fight Inequality." Ideally money would naturally flow from wealthy people to the suffering destitute unfortunate as an expression that they feel others' pain. In practice progressive taxation can facilitate this transfer of wealth--so critical for societal stability.