Make everybody rich.

• Author: Turner, Frederick
• Position: Advice

Any inventory of the world's current problem areas probably includes several of the following: war, the environment, education, health, crime, women's rights, unemployment, the oppression of the poor, racism, xenophobia, restrictions on political liberty, the decline of religious spirituality, various crises in the arts, lack of support for scientific research and the space program, and overpopulation.

There is, in fact, a simple and effective solution to all these problems: make everybody in the world rich. Poverty is not just one more head on the hydra, but the hydra itself that grows all the heads. Put a stake in the hydra, and the heads disappear.

The Panacea Is Obvious

The overwhelming evidence is that rich people don't like sending their children off to war, and they will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid doing so. They will take these actions individually, as did the parents of U.S. politicians who pulled strings to keep their kids out of Vietnam, or they will take them collectively, as did the Western nations that hovered nervously around Bosnia, like country club luncheon guests who have discovered a wasp on the cucumber sandwiches. In Kosovo, the rich nations would not let their children get any closer to the sharp end than fifteen thousand feet. A world full of rich people will obviously be too wussy to go to war, so war will die out. The resultant savings in military budgets will make the world richer still.

Rich people like to have a nice, clean, biodiverse environment, and they will go to extreme lengths to get it. They connive so successfully to avoid ecological distress that a whole government agency is devoted to ensuring that pollution sources are not unduly located in poor neighborhoods. But if there are no poor neighborhoods, rich people will make very sure that there are no pollution sources. Poor countries today are almost invariably more polluted and environmentally damaged than are rich countries, and the worst-polluted countries are in the old Soviet bloc, where poverty was ideologically privileged. Rich people have historically supported arboretums, national parks, game reserves, gardens, restored wetlands, and zoos. A rich world, out of pure self-interest, will invest in a biologically diverse planetary ecosystem.

In the teeth of principle, adverse public relations, political conviction, and enormous financial cost, rich people will obtain the best education they can for themselves and their children, even if they must abandon the public school system and pay twice. A world full of rich people is a world in which first-rate education will be in such hot demand by folk who can afford to finance it themselves that it will be plentiful, and governments will not need to supply it.

Rich people are notorious for their interest in their health and for the vast sums of money they pay to get and keep it. A world of wealthy valetudinarians will support cutting-edge medical research, first-rate hospitals, and a horde of well-trained and well-paid doctors; and, of course, everybody, as our premise stipulates, will be able to afford it.

Rich people rarely commit crimes, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that their natural human proclivities for criminality are usually thwarted by lack of opportunity and incentive. The reason gated communities are gated is to ensure that one's neighbors are rich and therefore unlikely to steal from or assault their neighbors, having too much to lose themselves. A world of rich people will be a world of police idleness.

Rich people support women's rights for a variety of reasons, the simplest being that because money accumulates and women live seven years longer than men, rich women tend to be richer than rich men and hence more able to assert their rights. Other reasons include the neutralization of male physical strength by the prostheses of wealth and technology, the greater freedom of the rich from reproductive labor (see "overpopulation"), the greater access rich women have to education, and rich men's demand for women who are interesting and present a real challenge. There is a pretty exact match worldwide between the relative wealth of a given nation and the relative extent of women's rights. A rich world is a gender-equal world.

Unemployment will disappear in a universally rich world, not because there will be no people without jobs but because unemployed rich people are not called "unemployed" at all, but "independently wealthy," "idle rich," "parasites," "comfortable," "philanthropists," or "retired." The word unemployed will become archaic and comic. In a rich world, workers in less creative and interesting occupations will have to be paid exorbitantly and given grandiose job titles--perhaps derived from the old aristocratic rankings, such as "count" or "marquis," or from the artistic and professional designations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as "maestro," "star," "doctor,"...