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Lurid: The other striking thing about this "ludricrously broad indicator" is that being in, say, the top ten percent in terms of wealth in the wealthiest country in the world would probably be insufficient to be classed as "rich" for the purposes of this discussion.
If you mean that by introducing the Rausings I've skewed the conversation, I disagree. I just wanted to make the point that even the fantasy-wealthy are nuanced, so generalisations here are as silly as they are elsewhere. And 'rich' is a ludicrously broad term, for exactly the reason you point out. Globally, much of the UK population is rich - if not almost all of it, when you factor in things like infrastructure, social security and health, and so on. The word is entirely context-dependent. Even if we agree that we're going to talk about wealth on a scale relative to incomes in the industrialised North West of Europe, the term could embrace a huge variation of salary and lifestyle.
When I was at school, we were given an exercise - you draw a piece of paper from a hat with a salary on it, and work out where you could afford to live and so on. The top salary was £40,000 p.a. - and we all thought that was a lot. Would you still be 'rich' living in London and making £40,000? Well, yes and no. After tax you're making 30k. You pay for accomodation and it's 25k at most. If you run a car, it's 23k. You pay your bills and it's 20k. That leaves you with a healthy one and a half grand per month to play with, assuming you're not saving, which you almost certainly should be. So call it an even thousand per month.
That's a lot of money, but it isn't telephone-numbers money. You don't live in a particularly nice area, and you rent a room rather than a flat, you drive a pretty ordinary car, and you do pay attention to where the money goes. You probably don't own property, although you could get on the ladder. So you're only rich up to a point. Lose your job or retire, and you're in trouble.
So come on, what does 'rich' mean? Security? Financial defense-in-depth? A wage cheque over a certain figure? Property? Or is it silly money? Or is it just living in a country where the Sun and the rain are in rough balance and no one's actually occupied half your capital city with an armed force?
'Rich' is a moveable feast, and half the time it means 'bad person who steals' and half the time it means 'what I want to be when I grow up'. |
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