I’ve decided to hold back the answers to the Christmas Puzzles until a few more people have attempted them.
Today I shall follow-up an earlier post about Spirituality in Marketing. In that post, I mention progress with a book, and I want to capture a part of the conversation. Many people in the voluntary and community sectors have reservations about marketing and accumulation of wealth. Such scepticism is admirable! We should be suspicious of any sales pitch.
But if we are going to re-build our communities we need to explore all the options available to us. Given the failure of grants as an approach to community development, a failure I’ve written about elsewhere, see the posts in the position category, we don’t have too many other options.
Two Ways to Understand Wealth
One problem is, when we talk about wealth we confuse two different ways of understanding it. So, here they are:
- Personal wealth is where the focus is on the amount of money I have accumulated and the power I have using it. The issue here is accountability. We can all think of examples of (usually new) millionaires who lose all their money in a few years, through gambling or similar. There are also those who salt away their wealth in off-shore tax havens. They move their money out of the community, into places where it is no longer accessible. The immensely wealthy, the 1% targeted by the Occupy movement, use their wealth to buy assets and lend them back to businesses at very high interest rates. We don’t normally see this happening because it happens out of sight. But we see its effects in low wages and unsustainable behaviour, damaging to the environment.
- Social wealth is where there is some degree of accountability. The focus is on money as it circulates in the local economy. If I purchase from local traders and do not spend money in large chains and if local people do the same, then many people benefit from the same pound as it circulates. Furthermore, I might find opportunities to invest my profit in other enterprises, thus growing the local economy.
Obviously the same person can experience both approaches to wealth but at least by being clear there are these two approaches, we can all be aware of how we spend and accumulate income.
Perhaps we could re-examine John Wesley’s three point economic plan. In the eighteenth century, he traveled the UK, preaching to the new industrial poor. His advice to entrepreneurs was “earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can”. By save he meant not accumulation in bank accounts but spending money wisely, so that you have an excess than can be given to people in need.
This approach allows the wealthy scope to grow successful and ethical businesses. Is it something we need to revisit?