And, So What?
This just out: There are now 946 billionaires in the world, up from 793 such financially healthy individuals in the previous year, among whose numbers are 83 female billionaires. Fully 53 nations are represented on 2007's list of unimaginably-rich, with 60% of those listed considered to be self-made billionaires. For the first time in its record-keeping history of the financially bloated, Forbes magazine includes billionaires from Romania and Serbia.There was a time, and it doesn't seem all that long ago that to have attained the financial status of a millionaire was considered to be hovering close to heavenly-exalted territory. People aspire to great riches as the fount of an entrepreneurial life well lived, a haven from the exigencies of material necessity gone afoul, the prestige that society heaps upon the successfully wealthy.
With great wealth comes accessibility. Nothing is impossible (almost; discounting the Grim Reaper and his henchmen - incurable diseases, mental gloom, imponderable dissatisfactions) for those to whom success grants the Croesus syndrome. Others, less gifted in the ability to make their ideas pay off so handsomely view the monied elite among us with great envy. Their much-vaunted style of living, their entree to other areas of life not granted the peons of society, and above all that they need not be nagged by the mundane economic worries that beset us all.
People of modest means think longingly of becoming a millionaire, of enjoying a lifestyle free of pedestrian worries, engaging in a style of life-pleasures hitherto only the province of the wealthy. Lotteries and gaming and gambling are all minor vices inveigling people into parting with their meagre earnings with the constant hope that small investments in chance will avail them the happenstance of prosperity granted the winner.
The world's wealthiest individual, Bill Gates, a self-made entrepreneur whose business enterprise challenged the world of communication while utilizing the most questionable and even legally-challenged business practices to monopolize what he considered his territorial imperative has $56-billion to his credit. And to his credit he dispenses a mind-boggling - yet minuscule to his sum total - amount of money toward public charity.
The total net worth of the entire list of billionaires has reached $3.5 trillium, up 35% from what it realized in 2006. We are informed time and again that the gap between the have-not and those that have in abundance is growing, and that's clearly an understatement, as these figures demonstrate exponential growth. So here we have individuals who have amassed singular fortunes, while great hordes of people see themselves gradually slipping behind in the acquisition of life's financial wherewithal.
And those great numbers don't even take into account the millions upon millions of people worldwide whose lives are exemplified by abject poverty, early deaths due to nutritional deprivation and disease. People with no hope for betterment in their mean-and-lean lives, nor for their children's futures. Contrasted with a relative handful of individuals whose personal wealth is so great as to compare with the wealth of small nations.
Where does much of that wealth come from? Industry to be sure, but let's not forget the entertainment industry, the fast-food industry, the communications industry. Bread and circuses given to the people, but bread and circuses whose quality and variety and necessity in the modern world leads to an introspection of why their lean content has given them such great wealth.
Another enigma in a puzzling world of anomalies.
Labels: Particularities/Peculiarities
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, March 10, 2007
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