Riches And Poverty (1910) - free ebook by L. G. Chiozza (Leo George Chiozza) Money

RICHES AND POVERTY

(1910) BY L. G. CHIOZZA MONEY, M.P. ELEVENTH EDITION METHUEN &amp; CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON TO MY WIFE...

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PREFACE TO THE TENTH (REVISED) EDITION, 1910

THE present edition of "Riches and Poverty" revises my estimates of the distribution of the wealth of the United Kingdom down to the year 1908. The effect of the revision is to show that in the five years that have elapsed since this work was first published, the distribution of wealth has grown even more unequal. The comparative stationariness of money wages of late years is a fact upon which the labourers themselves, and not less the nation of which they form by far the greater part, are to be

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CHAPTER I THOUGHTS ARISING OUT OF A GREAT CONTROVERSY

DURING recent years a considerable share of the thoughts of men has been devoted to the consideration of one part of our fiscal policy,—that part which is concerned with Customs duties. In public and in private, on hundreds of platforms and in thousands of homes, the ancient issue has been debated between those who hold that Customs duties should be imposed for revenue purposes only and those who contend that Customs duties may be used as instruments with which to direct wisely the agricultural,

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CHAPTER II THE NATIONAL INCOME

IN considering and estimating the national income it is necessary to remind ourselves, in the first place, that our production, our exports and our imports, alike consist of both goods and services. The processes of thought and action result in the conception, production, distribution and use of ponderable and imponderable commodities. In an advanced community the greater part of the material and immaterial productions which are the expressions of its various activities becomes the subject of ex

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CHAPTER III DISTRIBUTION OF THE NATIONAL INCOME

TAKING the population of the United Kingdom, 1908, at 44,500,000, and the total income at £1,844,000,000, we get an average income per head of about £40. Thus, if the income of the nation were equally distributed amongst its inhabitants, a family of five persons would enjoy an income of about £200 per annum. But how is the £1,840,000,000 actually divided amongst our people? Contrasts between great riches and extreme poverty are every day presented to our eyes. Can we do anything to reduce to a d

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CHAPTER IV THE ESTATES OF RICH AND POOR

OUR review of the extraordinary facts relating to what has been called with grim humour the "National" income, prepares us for an examination of the estates of rich and poor. Legal distribution of the property of deceased persons can only be made upon payment of certain taxes, commonly called death duties, and legally known as the Estate, Legacy and Succession duties. The nature and extent of these duties I shall discuss in a later chapter. At this point I am only concerned with the facts which

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CHAPTER V THE NATIONAL ACCUMULATIONS

WE pass from the consideration of the property which is left at death in a single year to the estimation of the value of the total capital stock of the United Kingdom. We can proceed by two different methods. We can argue from the property left by those who die in a single year to the property possessed by the living, or we can capitalize that part of the national income which is derived from property. The former method was used as long ago as the 'fifties by Porter in his "Progress of the Natio

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CHAPTER VI THE MONOPOLY OF CAPITAL

IN view of the facts as to rich and poor estates which we examined in Chapter 4, it is obvious that to state that the accumulated wealth of the United Kingdom probably amounts to £300 per head of the population, or £1,500 per family of five persons, is to mask in averages a great inequality of distribution. Reverting to the Death Duty records, it is possible, by means of them, to give a true idea of the manner of distribution amongst our people of the greater part of the nearly £14,000,000,000 o

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CHAPTER VII THE AREA OF THE UNITED KINGDOM

LET us now consider the area of the United Kingdom. I use the word area with intention, for it is its area which differentiates land from all other commodities. Man can make soil by disintegrating rock. He can entirely strip the soil from a given superficies. He can change a fen into a farm. He can rob land of its fertility by careless cultivation. He can rear floors above land or sink shafts below it. Upon the base afforded by a small piece of land he can manufacture enough cloth to clothe a mu

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CHAPTER VIII THOSE WHO WORK AND THOSE WHO WAIT

WE have seen that, although the sum of the land rents taken by the owners of the British area is actually very great, it is small as compared with the total of the national income. We have also seen that there is a simple explanation of this. We have become a manufacturing and a town-dwelling people, and the area occupied by our factories and towns is very small. The chief demand for land is confined to the outskirts of such towns as are increasing in size. The landlords of the big towns have th

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CHAPTER IX PROFITS, BAD TRADE AND UNEMPLOYMENT

IF we look at the amounts of profit assessed under the income tax during the last fifteen years we are struck with the steady growth of the figures:— GROSS PROFITS ASSESSED TO INCOME TAX These figures have been widely quoted, and with reason, as indicative of rapidly growing prosperity. We see that the gross assessment to income tax has actually grown by over £336,000,000 since 1894. We could have no better proof of the growth of the national product which is divided up amongst us. There is but

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CHAPTER X PART OF THEIR WAGES

IN considering the earnings, as distinguished from the rates of wages, of the manual labour classes, we have found it necessary to make an allowance for time lost through sickness and accidents. Let us now examine the available records of the industrial accidents and diseases of occupations which are part of the wages of the working classes, and at the price of which the comforts of the well-to-do are purchased. As to persons employed in factories and workshops, we have the reports made to the i

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CHAPTER XI CONSEQUENCES

THE consequences of the error of distribution now demand our attention. The congestion of so much of the entire income and accumulated wealth of the United Kingdom in a few hands has a most profound influence upon the national development. It means that the great mass of the people—the nation itself—can progress only in such fashion as is dictated by the enterprise or caprice of a fraction of the population. The possessors of wealth exercise the real government of the country and the nominal gov

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CHAPTER XII THE WASTE OF CAPITAL

IT has been observed by Professor Marshall that "perhaps £100,000,000 annually are spent even by the working classes, and £400,000,000 by the rest of the population of England in ways that do little or nothing towards making life nobler or truly happier." [38] In view of the fact that the "working classes" are the bulk of the nation, and the "rest of the population" a relative handful, this estimate points to a little waste by the many, and much waste by the few. The fact is, of course, that if

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CHAPTER XIII THE GOLDEN KEY

THE misdirection of labour and the waste of income can be checked if we would have it so. It is in our power, as a nation, to employ the wealth of the community for national ends and to increase abundantly the fertility of labour. It is true that we want "more trade," and it is also true that we need better use of the results of the trade that we have. The problem of poverty is neither obscure nor insoluble; its cause is clear from the extraordinary series of facts we have examined; its solution

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CHAPTER XIV THE NATION'S CHILDREN

LET us begin at the beginning with what should be the chief care of the reformer—the child. Every year in the United Kingdom there are some 700,000 deaths and some 1,200,000 births. The social structure which we seek to improve thus offers us a double hope. However degraded, however enfeebled, however criminal many of the units of the present generation may be, they must pass away. Unit after unit is cancelled; unit after unit is replaced. The child, save in a small percentage of cases, is given

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CHAPTER XV THE SCHOOL

IN a commonwealth a man would need a healthy mind in a healthy body to be true to himself, and to every man. In an unorganized community, in which each man must needs struggle with his fellow for the right to live, and in which to be unselfish is to be weak, and to be weak is to go to the wall, a man needs a healthy mind in a healthy body in order to set up himself and those dear to him in a fortress impregnable, with ramparts against competitors, secret stores against time of siege, and insuran

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CHAPTER XVI THE HOME

IT is an amusing statistical fact that at the census of 1901 our "overcrowded" England had but 558 persons to the square mile, or one person to 1.15 acres, or one family to about 6 acres. If in 1901 the population of England and Wales had been distributed evenly over the area there would have been a distance of 240 feet between each person. In 1871 a similar distribution would have removed each person from his neighbour by 288 feet. Thus England is little more "crowded" to-day than it was a gene

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CHAPTER XVII THE EMPTY COUNTRY

ALTHOUGH it is a well-known fact that the increase of population of the United Kingdom is practically an addition to the urban population, it may be well to preface consideration of the land question in its relation to the national wealth and income by reminding the reader of the precise facts of the case. If we have regard only to the technical "Urban" and "Rural" Districts, we get the following figures: ENGLAND AND WALES: POPULATION OF URBAN AND RURAL DISTRICTS RESPECTIVELY Thus the urban popu

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CHAPTER XVIII ORGANIZATION

IT has already been remarked in these pages that quite inadequate numbers of persons are engaged in the production of many useful articles. This would be true even if all the individuals enumerated as producers in the census returns were fully employed upon existing plant and under their existing managers. As a matter of fact, they are not fully employed. Unemployment or short time always exists in greater or less degree. Between inadequate numbers and inadequate employment of those numbers the

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CHAPTER XIX THE AGED POOR

IN "Riches and Poverty," edition 1905, I passed at this point to the consideration of the cruellest phase of Poverty, the poverty of the aged. Since 1905 Mr Asquith has given us an Old Age Pension Act, and it is happily unnecessary to repeat in full the pleas which were advanced in these pages in 1905. It is well, however, again to record the known facts with regard to poverty in old age. If we did not know our country, and had never encountered its poor in the flesh, in what condition could we

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CHAPTER XX ADAM SMITH'S FIRST MAXIM OF TAXATION

OUR next task shall be to examine the question of taxation in relation to the Error of Distribution. It is over one hundred and thirty years since Adam Smith penned his famous maxims of taxation, the first and most important of which ran as follows: "The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government as nearly as possible in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the

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CHAPTER XXI THE MAIN INSTRUMENT OF TAXATION

THROUGH the income tax we go directly to the person upon whom we desire to levy taxation, and take from him such portion of his earnings or other profits as we consider to be his just contribution to the revenue. Through the income tax we can, if we care to do so, cause each subject of the State to contribute towards the expenses of government according to his ability. It is the purpose of this chapter to show that the income tax could be so amended that, so far from being counted an obnoxious i

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CHAPTER XXII THE DEATH DUTIES

IN "Riches and Poverty," edition 1905, it was urged that the then existing Estate Duties, ranging from 1 per cent. to 8 per cent., might be sensibly increased. The revisions which have been made since 1905 are clearly shown in the comparative table given on the next page, which reviews in part the Estate Duties of the Budgets of 1894, 1907 and 1909. The rates of Death Duty have been thus raised to about the level suggested in "Riches and Poverty," edition 1905. The scale does not represent the w

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CHAPTER XXIII OF REVENUE WITHOUT TAXATION

AFTER dealing at some length with the details of British taxation it is well to point out why it is necessary for the British Government to raise so much revenue by taxes. It appears to be commonly taken for granted that in the matter of national ways and means a source of revenue is the same thing as a source of taxation. Perhaps it is not surprising that this idea is prevalent in Britain, for of a truth we have scarcely any national revenue save what is derived from the more or less just taxat

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CHAPTER XXIV CONCLUSION

LEST there be any lack of perspective in our view of the distribution of wealth and of the material progress of the working classes, I preface this concluding chapter with a note upon former investigations of the national income. In 1868, Dudley Baxter, in his classical paper on the National Income read to the Royal Statistical Society, estimated that in 1867, the population being 30,000,000, the manual workers, then estimated to number 10,960,000, took £325,000,000 out of a total national incom

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