This material is excerpted from the CCPA (Canadian Centre for POlicy Alternatives)n December 1998 p. . The source is the United Nations 1998 Human Development Report: * The richest one-fifth of the world's people consumes 86% of all goods and services, while the poorest one-fifth consumes just 1.3%. The richest one-fifth consumes 45% of all meat and fish, 58% of all energy used, and 84% of all paper, has 74% of all telephonelines and owns 87% of all vehicles. * THe world's 225 richest individuals (of whom 60 are American with total assets of 311 billion) have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion--equal to the combined income of the poorest 47% of the entire world's population. THe three richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product of the 48 least developed countries. * North Americans spend 8.5 billion a year on cosmetics--2.5 billion more than the annual amount needed to provide basis education for everyone in the world. * The additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for women, adequate food for all, and clean water and safe sewers for all is estimated to be roughly 40 billion a year--less than 4% of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world. Comment: Obviously we don't need socialism at all just some minimal "paternalism" by the 225 richest persons. Interest on their wealth would surely be 4% a year at least and this could be used to achieve a wonderful world welfare state ;-). I gather that some of these figures on consumption may be a bit misleading. For example energy that is used but is not bought would not show up in the UN figures as I understand it. Seems to me Jane Kelsey complained loudly about this manner of accounting since it ignores the value of projects that might not lead to GNP increases but might be very valuable in terms of people's lives i.e. digging a well closer to a village so that people-usually women--do not spend half the day hauling water. Cheers, Ken Hanly
