Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

The rich get richer and the poor get poorerwages rose from £2.83 to £5.83; increases of 96 per cent and106 per cent respectively. In 2013, only 2 per cent of fulltimeworkers earned the minimum wage (£6.19 per hour)whereas 45 per cent of full-time workers earned less thanthis in 1975 (in 2013 prices) (ONS 2014b: 11).The progress of the poor relative to the richThe poor get wealthierDiscussions about ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’ tend to focuson income rather than wealth. Wealth has always beenmuch less evenly distributed than income. We accumulatewealth as we age, so the young often have very little if anyof it. Even allowing for this, the poor have historically hadvirtually no assets at all and many people had debts thatexceeded the value of their meagre possessions. As late as1970, the poorest half of the British population had a 0 percent share of the country’s wealth (Dorling et al. 2007: 4).By 2010, this had risen to 14 per cent (ONS 2012d: 7). Bycontrast, the share of wealth held by the rich fell sharply inthe twentieth century. Between 1923 and 2003, the proportionof net wealth held by the richest 1 per cent fell from 61to 21 per cent and the share held by the richest five per centfell from 82 to 40 per cent (Dorling et al. 2007: 4).And some of the poor become richA further confusion arises from the implicit assumptionthat ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’ are the same people over time.It is difficult to argue that someone who comes from a71