After reading an article on the Huffington Post website about income inequality as represented by an OECD report, I decided I should list a couple of reasons why I think individuals in less than favorable financial circumstances can never truly become wealthy.
It’s important to understand first that those in the modern right wing political chorus are pushing for societies based on equal opportunity instead of the tried and failed equalized income model. Basically, everybody wants to live in a society where opportunities are readily available for anyone and everyone, regardless of economic circumstances.
It should not matter whether a single mother with two children without any higher education or whether someone’s privileged enough to have been able to build a sizable business and has the right connections to make things happen, both should have access to individually relevant opportunities. And fortunately here in Canada, this is very much the situation.
However, in other supposedly well to do countries such as the United States and the UK, people still operate on the belief that wealth comparable to that of the richest is attainable by the average person. Capitalism supposedly allows for any individual under any circumstance to become wealthy if certain opportunities are noticed and pursued.
If capitalism was a truthful model, accurate in it’s predictions, shouldn’t there have been more wealthier people in the world by now? instead of these income gaps we’re noticing through recent data.
Well, in my opinion, there are several reasons why those that are poor and those that are middle class can never become wealthy, in Canada, in the U.S., the U.K. and anywhere else in the world. They are the following:
Lack of time and money to recognize and capitalize on opportunities
If you’ve read any of the written by the rich literature in the past twenty years, you’ll notice time management to be a common theme. Poor time management is one of the most often quoted reasons by the rich as to why people are financially destitute in privileged countries.
I think this to be a bogus reason loaded with faulty logic. It’s easy to demonstrate why poor time management is not a proper reason as to why people have money problems. For example, lets take an average situation as we assume most people work eight hours a day (I’m being very lenient). Then, if one lives in North America we also allow three to four hours in commuting, traveling from the grocery store and back, picking up the children etc. I assume it’s also necessary to take two hours to cook for an average family of four throughout the day. Add thirty minutes to do laundry, thirty minutes for oral hygiene, an hour for early morning and bedtime preparation combined, if winter time, thirty minutes for the car to heat up and to scrape the windshield, five to eight hours of sleep etc. etc. and that should take up a total of twenty-four hours a day. Not much time left to recognize opportunities, to start a business, to work for a promotion.
At this point you’ll hear the rich saying, well what about the weekend? I own a business so I work 24/7. Again, more white noise to confuse people on the almost impossible task of becoming wealthy in the 21st century. I assume the average person takes at least one day during the week to spend with the family and the other to relax and preserve whatever sanity is lost during the hectic first five days of the week.
And I’m not even accounting for people with disabled family members, terrible injuries and diseases, born in miserable circumstances, suffering from abuse and those that work on the weekend.
Unfortunately, with lack of time comes also a lack of money. Everything costs nowadays, water, moving from one place to another, sustenance etc. Also, pretty much everything is bought on credit, so almost nothing is owned. Under such circumstances, how can one find capital to start a venture that will change their financial fortunes?
It’s not possible.
Not lack of access to opportunities but lack of tools to capitalize
This reason is self-explanatory. Say that you recognize an opportunity and wish to capitalize on it, but you lack the necessary resources. Whether it’s time, money or manpower, you miss out because you have none of these readily available.
And since there are a limited amount of opportunities floating around in a highly competitive world, if you miss your chance, well it may be snatched up by others better positioned to take advantage of the opportunity.
Lack of competitive skills and businesslike personality
Not everybody can be a salesman! Some lack the necessary guile, courage, boldness, verbal and presentation skills necessary to be successful in sales.
Of course this can apply to everything sales related. Such as selling yourself for a promotion, selling a service or product, convincing others to join your cause, public speaking etc. These all require a certain level of salesmanship.
So say that you do take advantage of an opportunity and all is well until you find out that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of others such as yourself that have recognized the very same or similar opportunity. Now you discover that your service or product is in direct competition with other services and products out of which most are superior to yours.
Statistically, you almost have a zero chance to bring your opportunity to full fruition. There will always be others more privileged, better prepared and more confident than you.
Therefore capitalism, at it’s best, is a system that produces some success based on individual effort, but at it’s worst, and this is most of the time, it produces a dis-proportionally high number of failures throughout an individual’s lifetime. It’s almost as if it’s designed to produce failure.
However, it is the only system we currently have for a functioning society and it reflects our human nature almost impeccably. So we’re not going to get rid of it anytime soon.
