Ending world poverty

[firemanbob]

Are you hard of thinking or something? To the estimated 1.1 billion children in the world living in poverty, your claim that this would make us all poor is as selfish and stupid as it is offensive.

 

No but you clearly are, because they will still be poor as will everyone else.

[chem1st]

Its actually 5.25 but 57% of it is uninhabitable which means we could have 2.25 acres of habitable land each.

 

For the UK to achieve 2.25 acres of habitable land each, we would have to kick more than half the people out of the country.

 

You can live in this country and posses land elsewhere, and vice versa. It need not be divided into plots and allocated exactly, then re-fenced and divided every few years to take account of global population.

 

The global land surface could be owned on behalf of the global population rather than by individuals, sovereign states and so on.

 

A Global welfare state based upon universal global suffrage, land ownership, free-trade and so on could work well.

 

Instead of British Steel or Tata Steel we could have Global Steel.

 

Instead of Yorkshire water etc. in the UK and nationalised water infrastructure, ISIS dams etc. we could have Global Water, funded via global taxation and provided free to all in their homes. We could have a massive public infrastructure and house building program across all the continents.

[firemanbob]

You can live in this country and posses land elsewhere, and vice versa. It need not be divided into plots and allocated exactly, then re-fenced and divided every few years to take account of global population.

 

The global land surface could be owned on behalf of the global population rather than by individuals, sovereign states and so on.

 

So no one will own it but the powerful people at the top will control it.

[chem1st]

So no one will own it but the powerful people at the top will control it.

 

All would own it and control it. We wouldn't need the poor argument that high salaries would be needed to attract talent. For they'd be taxed progressively and thus be capped, like salaries for everyone else.

[firemanbob]

All would own it and control it. We wouldn't need the poor argument that high salaries would be needed to attract talent. For they'd be taxed progressively and thus be capped, like salaries for everyone else.

 

How would everyone control it?

[tinfoilhat]

You can live in this country and posses land elsewhere, and vice versa. It need not be divided into plots and allocated exactly, then re-fenced and divided every few years to take account of global population.

 

The global land surface could be owned on behalf of the global population rather than by individuals, sovereign states and so on.

 

A Global welfare state based upon universal global suffrage, land ownership, free-trade and so on could work well.

 

Instead of British Steel or Tata Steel we could have Global Steel.

 

Instead of Yorkshire water etc. in the UK and nationalised water infrastructure, ISIS dams etc. we could have Global Water, funded via global taxation and provided free to all in their homes. We could have a massive public infrastructure and house building program across all the continents.

 

What if my floods or is otherwise rubbish? Do I get a rebate? Borrow someone else's land?

 

Currently the global population is going up by around 8% a decade. In you utopia I'm sure it will still keep going up at that rate at least. In ten years time after your revolution what are going to do with a 10% increase in population? Do I give up 10% of my land (which maybe a swamp/desert/cess pit at this point).

 

---------- Post added 15-09-2014 at 23:32 ----------

 

How would everyone control it?

 

Our global government would control it with guns and fear. I cannot even begin to think how this pipedream could exist without some very robust enforcement.

[JFKvsNixon]

I am a capitalist, but over the last 20 or so years things have started to go wrong.

 

For capitalism to work there has to be a trickle down of money, usually through rising wages, this means that people will buy the goods and services on offer to allow the successful businesses to keep on growing.

 

This wasn't happening before the previous crash, wages were pretty stagnant, and the boom was funded via credit and rising house prices. Capitalism will not work unless everyone shares in the success, so wages have to rise, not in some ad hoc manner, but success has to be rewarded, which in turn encourages an aspirational society.

 

How can a society be aspirational when the people at the very top's wages have increased beyond all measure when compared to the ordinary worker.

 

Capitalism is also doomed to failure if capital is hoarded. The money has to be put to work to generate further capital, this will grow the economy and create more jobs, and allow more people to participate in society. When money is held in accounts, not matter where the accounts are, that money is effectively removed from the economy.

 

The change from family run to shareholder owned businesses has also brought a short term thinking to the business world. The end of year results and their effect on the share price now seem to overrule any strategic or even socially responsible planning.

 

When businesses where family owned, they were part of the community and very often the families saw it as their duty to grow the business for the next generation, they were custodians of the business. Nowadays, the people who run the business know that they have couple of bad yearly results and they're out.

 

So gone are days of working hard to keep on a skilled workforce during a down turn, now the hard work is aimed towards cutting costs during the downturn in some short turn scramble.

 

What is happening is that currently we are suffering from extremely poor leadership all round, in both business and politics. The sooner that the leaders notice that as a society we are all linked, and sooner or later if they don't run our society in a more responsible manner then things will change, and not necessarily for the better.

 

I still believe in capitalism, after all it has improved our society's quality of life beyond all measure in the last few hundred years.

 

Sorry for my late night rant, and the undoubted numerous typos.

[tzijlstra]

Welcome to the socialist state of Sheffield.

 

There isn't half some rubbish being touted in this thread.

 

1. Can someone explain that if land for everybody is the answer, how come large swathes of it are vacated in Scotland alone? This highlands and islands have been struggling with a drain of young people to the effects of urbanisation for decades and it is getting worse, not better.

 

2. The states where poverty is mostly eradicated are those states that have a high degree of free market combined with a government that takes its duty of care seriously (ie. most of Europe).

 

3. China still has enormous poverty, it also has communal land-laws - in other words, any one entity other than the state can not own land. They only started climbing out of their self-dug hole of despair when Deng Xiaoping realised that even if this was the case, they would still need to let 'a chosen few' exploit the communal land to ensure inward investment and to optimise returns on that communal land.

 

4. Look at other examples in the past: The USSR failed, Cuba failed, North Korea fails miserably. Even more gentle socialist states (Portugal technically is a socialist but non-marxist state for example) have a hard time being thoroughly socialist. Planned economies have a tendency to become over bureaucratised, there is no cleansing mechanism and corruption in such systems (well documented even by USSR sources) is rife, there is no way to avoid it.

 

It is great that you want to end world poverty, truly noble.

 

That is all it is though.

[tinfoilhat]

I am a capitalist, but over the last 20 or so years things have started to go wrong.

 

For capitalism to work there has to be a trickle down of money, usually through rising wages, this means that people will buy the goods and services on offer to allow the successful businesses to keep on growing.

 

This wasn't happening before the previous crash, wages were pretty stagnant, and the boom was funded via credit and rising house prices. Capitalism will not work unless everyone shares in the success, so wages have to rise, not in some ad hoc manner, but success has to be rewarded, which in turn encourages an aspirational society.

 

How can a society be aspirational when the people at the very top's wages have increased beyond all measure when compared to the ordinary worker.

 

Capitalism is also doomed to failure if capital is hoarded. The money has to be put to work to generate further capital, this will grow the economy and create more jobs, and allow more people to participate in society. When money is held in accounts, not matter where the accounts are, that money is effectively removed from the economy.

 

The change from family run to shareholder owned businesses has also brought a short term thinking to the business world. The end of year results and their effect on the share price now seem to overrule any strategic or even socially responsible planning.

 

When businesses where family owned, they were part of the community and very often the families saw it as their duty to grow the business for the next generation, they were custodians of the business. Nowadays, the people who run the business know that they have couple of bad yearly results and they're out.

 

So gone are days of working hard to keep on a skilled workforce during a down turn, now the hard work is aimed towards cutting costs during the downturn in some short turn scramble.

 

What is happening is that currently we are suffering from extremely poor leadership all round, in both business and politics. The sooner that the leaders notice that as a society we are all linked, and sooner or later if they don't run our society in a more responsible manner then things will change, and not necessarily for the better.

 

I still believe in capitalism, after all it has improved our society's quality of life beyond all measure in the last few hundred years.

 

Sorry for my late night rant, and the undoubted numerous typos.

 

A very good post. Capitalism is a twisted version of its former self. At the crash, at least one bank should have been left to fail - capitalisms natural selection. Houses shouldn't be too expensive for professional people to buy. It's all gone a bit wrong.

[chem1st]

How would everyone control it?

 

Some form of global democracy. A bit like they do now, but much more easily.