Absolute Poverty

In 1970 the average wage of male workers in Britain was £50 per week, £2,500 per year, which allowed them to enjoy a standard of living their predecessors in the nineteenth century would not have imagined possible. In the same year the average interest rate paid by building societies to investors was just under 7 per cent which was barely sufficient to protect funds from the depredations of inflation. But suppose, for the sake of argument, investors were able to earn 5 per cent in real terms: on this basis it is easy to calculate the minimum capital necessary for a person to earn the equivalent of the average wage without working, was of the order of £50,000. This is only a rough calculation but it tells us something very important about our society, since the distribution of personal wealth is so unequal that only a small percentage of the population has this amount of money. In 1974 the top 3½ per cent of the population owned 87 per cent of the ordinary shares, 94 per cent of other company securities and 96 per cent of all personally owned land. In other words the ownership of income-yielding assets is highly concentrated among a very small section of the population, and by this criterion of wealth the vast majority of the population are absolutely poor. They live in absolute poverty and are dependent upon work and wages.