We’ll never be rich

While we could be considered to be obscenely rich by world standards, it seems we’re far from happy with what we’ve got. Even though even the poorest Australians would still rank well within the top 20% in the world as far as wealth is concerned, we can’t bring ourselves to admit that we’ve got it good.

I know that it can be hard to fully participate in Australian society without a reasonable income by Australian standards. Being on a fairly low income I know what it’s like to have to tighten the belt or wonder where the money will come from for our next electricity bill. But then I look at our lifestyle and realise that we have it so good. According to statistics, our family would probably be considered to be living below the poverty line, yet our lifestyle would be the envy of 90% of the world’s population. We’ve got it very, very good.

This report from The Australia Institute tells us that even our millionaires, who would rank in the top few percent of world’s earners, just aren’t comfortable enough on their incomes.

They open their report with some startling statistics.

Research by The Australia Institute has revealed that, despite being well off by any objective standards, most Australians believe that their incomes are inadequate to meet their needs. A Newspoll survey for the Institute found that 62 per cent of Australians, including 48 per cent of the richest 20 per cent, believe that they cannot afford to buy everything they really need.

Later in the report they give some of the implications of the data.

Governments frequently declare that their objective is to create a prosperous Australia but any objective assessment would surely conclude that most Australians are already prosperous. However, the results reported in this paper indicate that few Australians feel prosperous. Even among the burgeoning group of millionaires and those with very high incomes, only one in twenty regard themselves as prosperous.

So, only one in twenty Australian millionaires consider themselves prosperous. That really is obscene. As for the rest of us, as long as we continue to compare ourselves to the 10% of people in the world earning more than us, we’ll never be satisfied. It’s time we not only realised how good we’ve got it, but started focussing on the 90% of people in the world who have less than us and look at ways of helping them to feel a little more prosperous. I’m sure for most of them, ‘prosperous‘ would simply mean knowing where your next few meals are coming from.

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