People are always after a discount, including myself but I suspect most of us are not be willling to offer our work time or receive pensions at a discounted rate.
Well, I for one am. If work is in abundance and people buying my time are making lots of money with the help I give them, then I can charge a great deal more than when times are tough and there is not the surplus to throw around. If I wound my prices up to sustain what I perceive as a "decent living income" in my worst times I might very well sell nothing at all.
I have sold my time discounted at up to 90% depending on the contribution it will make to the recipient. Same level of advice, different realizable value. People often have a very high opinion of the value of their time and experience and how much others should pay for it. Usually an upward ratchet based on someone in the past having been willing to pay that for it. There is no absolute value in many services - it comes down to what they contribute to a buyer and how that buyer values them in the context of their overall circumstances and prefernces. The fact is that if others can get the same elsewhere at lower cost then I must either compete on price or provide something of genuine additional value to justify a higher price.
That's services. Many goods are aspirational and people pay for them because they perceive them as desirable or impressive to others. Plus the Western way is to hype things up so people are motivated to work harder to earn the money to have something dubbed "better" than their peers have (or they have afforded to date). Very often this is all a mass hype to keep the consumerist gravy train flowing. It's "I want" not "I need".
After our 2nd visit to India this Christmas and touring the hectic north of the country, seeing how some people exist and scratch a living, and are generally industrious and cleaver at making enough money to live or exist i guess....it makes you wonder. They do it because they have to. Love the country by the way.....
Again last night on tv" errrrr we are so overcrowded" lol believe me in comparison to India the country is nigh on deserted.
When you allow the state to take over what was historically the family/extended family's responsibility (still the situation in many countries)when we farm out responsibility/care of our old to the state. When I see people complaining that they don't have enough and are getting £26000 a year in benefits? Jobs that many from India would die for turned down by feckless lazy wasters. We have tied ourselves up in nots.....This money should be spent on education or we are doomed
It's down to expectations, though, and the notion of a right to a certain basic standard of living. In UK the culture has positively encouraged the breakdown of extended families who collectively support each other in LDCs. Having grown up and spent nearly half my life in one of the world's poorest countries I can honestly say that as people, its native residents had admirable value systems most I meet in the developed world will never be able to understand or embrace. However, alongside those admirable values some truly terrible ones were able to reign free. Cruelty and unspeakable violence being two which spring to mind.
However, it is all down to expectations. The Anglo-American model positively encourages (and in some cases demands) the prioritization of self-promotion over the family in return for the belief that a job or the State will step in where support is needed. This leads to a breakdown of extended family bonds. When immediate families break apart (as they increasingly do) people are left unsupported and alone struggling to survive both emotionally and financially. The culture of dependency is certainly not helped by this.
As far as what people expect, they have been led to those expectations by a greedy consumerist society, of which certainly the Americans are often fiercly defensive and most of the West has been sucked into following suit with in the name of progress and development. Even hitherto less "free market" dominated societies.
I believe there is a happy medium, which some of our European neighbours used to be able to sustain more effecrtively than they can now.
I completely agree with a great deal of what you are saying, Eddie. However there is a distaste for inequality in the West which results in trying to support a far higher minimum quality of life than the system is capable of supporting for all. Trying to shield the vulnerable from hardship unfortunately resulted in an ever-increasing number of people taking advantage for an easy life. Given human nature being typically as it is, that was inevitable and completely foreseeable. But a great vote-winner.... To fund it all required taxes off thriving businesses and to have those required greed-driven materialism. So the prioritization of money-making over family and social values was applauded and widely adulated.
The whole sham is coming unstuck now, though. It's meaningless to talk comparative numbers between a country where a mango in Waitrose costs a day's African wages (or more in many cases) and a bedsit in London could buy an eight-bedroomed house with swimming pool in many places. Prices in the West for basic commodities are multiples of what they are in those countries and with that brings a need for people to have much higher sums in their hands to make a living.
As far as the hand-out culture is concerned, well, if you give anything away for nothing for long enough people will get accustomed to having it for nothing... and in a society where leisure, entertainment and free time is one of the most coveted commodities there is, it's no surprise that those offered the means to have it for nothing with their basic needs paid for are going to be signing up (/ on) in their droves.
The only way education is going to hit home is for people to travel for themselves and get a sense of priorities. Many will learn nothing even then - because they consider that on the basis they were not born in those countries they have a god-given right to more. Sad but true.
