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price and level of dividend payments. Products aren't made to last much longer than their warranty period because if the product lasted forever, then people would never need to buy another one. As well as planned obsolescence, packaging and the product itself changes to appear slightly different so that you aren't satisfied with the one you have. This encourages you to buy more, which in turn means you work to buy more and the whole system is self perpetuating.

Re-using, recycling or repairing items is not in the spirit of things. Take a DVD player for instance. Yes, it is a quantum leap from the old days of the VCR, but you are still watching the same movie. I remember seeing Star Wars at a drive-in in the 1970s and was blown away. Watching it on DVD now, yes, it is clearer and the sound system is awesome, but the technological advances also serve to highlight the somewhat dodgy special effects. The DVD player costs less than $100, but if it breaks, it will cost $2-$300 to repair. Why? Because it is built cheaply to slot into a market that is constantly changing and is not built to be repaired. The whole thing is discarded and none of the components is re-used. That seems very wasteful to me.

- a country's total or per capita wealth is not a true reflection of the quality of life for the average person in that country. The United States tops the rankings in both, with the People's Republic of China not far behind, followed by Japan, India, Germany and the United Kingdom. There is no arguing that the United States is the standard bearer when it comes perceptions of quality of life. Yet eighty-five percent of that wealth is concentrated in the hands of less than ten percent of its population, while the bottom forty percent of the population only have around 0.2 percent of total wealth. To my mind, that means that there are a lot of people doing it tough there.

In China, the situation is much the same, though the social problems arising out of overcrowded and polluted cities and the one child policy, an attempt to manage that population pressures, mean that more than half of China's population sits below the poverty line. In every industrialized country it is the same, an increasing trend of concentrating wealth in the hands of a very small proportion of the population. So that while the total country's situation is improving, it is improving at a much higher rate for those with the greatest wealth and serving to widen the gap between rich and poor. You don't

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