Part 2: Money matters

This is the second in a four part series of posts that deal with some of my most significant feels about change in the current world.

As much as I don’t like to admit it, money does make the world go round. For every good act or motion of kindness, at the very least money was needed to make it a possibility.

I just recently was exposed to an idea. This idea is referred to as the Pareto Principle. This principal states that, at least when used as intended, 80 percent of the wealth of a given area is owned by 20 percent of the people. This is fascinating, in that there are many statistics that show that even more of the percentage of wealth is owned by even less people. If so few people are making up so much of the wealth of a nation or of the world, then what is all of the money going towards?

A perfect example is the ever-more popular growth of ridiculous salaries in professional sports. Players are now making $100 million easily over a 6 to 10 year span. Such easy money makes me question why that money isn’t being sent elsewhere. As great as sports are, the bottom line is that they are not life and death situations. Why can’t all the money that one team was going to spend on one player go to one country to feed one population for one year? All of the ones add up.

There are lots of places that this can be seen. Whether it is one nights proceeds in a certain form of entertainment or certain sporting events or a thousand of other areas, if just a few corporations spent even one night giving away everything it raised, then why couldn’t we, as a people, completely annihilate hunger on a global scale.

Apple just released the new iPhone 4G. Thousands and thousands of people flocked to get this phone the instant it hit the market. I have an idea. Goodness knows that there will be SOME form of iPhone 5 (whether it is in the form of a phone or something all the more outlandish). What if every dime that was made by the selling of this item went to solving hunger problems in third world countries? Here is what I see happening: The iPhone 5 sells several thousand items in the first year. All of the money goes to saving starving African villages. Now when Apple releases a new computer the following month, all of the money goes straight to Apple to compensate for the lost money that they suffered (if you can call solving world hunger suffering) by giving the money away. Well, now that Apple has demonstrated a public interest in solving global issues, all of a sudden everyone wants to buy an Apple computer because the image of the company is one of compassion and selflessness. All of a sudden, not only has Apple made back every dime it lost from the iPhone experiment, but has grown their business in the process. Everyone wins.

Now this experiment may seem outrageous, and frankly I don’t know enough about organizations and how much profit certain groups make. Apple may not make enough per unit to make this feasible, let alone realistic. All I am saying is that steps can and should be made to make sure that important issues are taken care of, and if we continue to say things like “that isn’t the way things work,” we will never, ever see results.