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Friday, August 29, 2008

Undeserving

I happened to be reading an article about a new book by Polly Toynbee (of The Guardian) and her partner David Walker (fo The Guardian). It's called Unjust Rewards and it's about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, that kind of thing. But something struck me as odd while I was reading it. While conservatives are criticsed for "Victorian" views of the deserving and undeserving poor, it seems to me that the views of the media elite are founded on similarly outdated notions of the deserving and undeserving rich: Some people who earn more than, say, five times the average wage deserve their money (eg, Guardian columnists) whereas other people (eg, lawyers and bankers) don't. I have a family member who is a lawyer, and I can testify that he works far harder than I do and definitely deserves his money. I don't have any family members who are bankers, so I can't say whether they deserve it or not.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

2 comments:

GreatSheElephant said...

how about local authority executives - are they deserving?

New blog address btw:
http://reallyquiteuseful.blogspot.com/

Cayce Pollard said...

Well, again, there are none in my family, so I can't judge first hand. On the whole, I would suspect those of them earning more than 5x average wage (my arbitrary benchmark for "rich") to be undeserving, but I'm happy to see evidence to the contrary.

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