Sunday, November 15, 2020

Riches

Life in the Shark Lane on Tumblr:

My ancestors, watching me dump an entire stick of cinnamon, two cloves, an allspice berry, and a generous grating of nutmeg into my tea, sweetened with white sugar and loaded with cream, while I sit in my clean warm house surrounded by books, 25+ outfits for different occasions, and 6 pairs of shoes, in a building heated so well I have the windows open in mid-autumn: 

Our daughter prospers. We are proud of her. She has never labored in a field but knows riches we could not have imagined. 

3 comments:

G. Verloren said...

How, then, would they react to the 1% of the population who own 50% of the planet?

John said...

They would assume such to be the case, since it was so in their time and in every time we know of.

G. Verloren said...

I'm not sure the numbers even remotely match up.

Populations were much smaller, total amounts of wealth were much smaller, and lands were subdivided among a much greater number of lords / rulers.

Sure, there were kings and whatnot - but overwhelmingly, such figures owned relatively little personally. King's weren't powerful because of the things they directly controlled - they were powerful because they had influence over their vassals. We think of kings as ruling entire kingdoms, but in truth they really only did so indirectly, and didn't personally possess anywhere near the degrees of wealth that modern billionaires do.

Virtually no kings directly owned anywhere near half the wealth of their kingdoms. Only the most absolute rulers could make such claims, and even then it was largely in name only. It would be unthinkable for a king to actually have personal ownership of, say, half the food of their realm - a ruler might claim ostensible ownership of such for purposes of prestige, but the reality on the ground would be that such food never left the possession of the king's subjects, and the king couldn't simply decide to "retrieve" their "property" on a whim, because it isn't really theirs.