{"id":950,"date":"2017-05-09T06:50:11","date_gmt":"2017-05-09T06:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/?p=950"},"modified":"2017-05-04T14:51:56","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T14:51:56","slug":"mwr-who-is-rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/making-work-real\/2017\/05\/mwr-who-is-rich\/","title":{"rendered":"MWR: Who is Rich?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Carl<\/a>
Carl Hewitt, first year business student at Southampton, ponders what makes someone ‘rich’.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Exploring the theme of rich\/poor proved to be an extremely interesting and eye-opening experience. I looked into various ideas of being \u2018rich\u2019 to get a broader view of the theme, finding wide-ranging answers including two teenagers involved in the London riots suggesting owning any business makes you rich (McClatchey, 2011), yet endless Google results insist we need \u2018emotional wealth\u2019 and teach others how to pursue it, for up to $CAD11,025 (Emotional Wealth Management Inc., N\/A).<\/p>\n

Roberton Williams, a fellow at the TPC (Tax Policy Centre) once said in an interview with CNN Money \u201cWho is rich? It\u2019s a good question. Rich depends on where you live and with whom you are comparing yourself\u201d. Brad Tuttle of Time Magazine writes that of people with $1 million – $5 million in assets, only 28% considered themselves wealthy (Tuttle, 2013), also mentioning that only 4 in 10 Americans with over $5 million in investible assets considered themselves \u2018truly wealthy<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\n

I was staggered to read that research done by Oxfam, saw that in fact, just 62 people own half the world\u2019s wealth (Elliott, 2016), and if comparing yourself to these select few, none of us will ever be \u2018truly wealthy\u2019. This then lead me to look at other ways of defining \u2018rich\u2019, e.g. data from the ONS including GDP per capita and the distribution of wealth, which news articles seemed to consistently use, highlighted in articles by the BBC and Economist, regularly telling of the variable gap between \u2018rich\/poor\u2019 in the UK and US over time (Harrison, 2012) (The Economist, 2006). This gap was a recurring theme mentioned time and time again, many discussing the rich\/poor gap among young people at university or in education (Yadoo, 2016).<\/p>\n

This leads me onto my second question. I struggled to come across any material relating to changing definitions of rich and poor over time, as a result I decided to give my own opinion based on my experiences. I am lucky enough to run my own business which made me consider why exactly it is that I want to make money and what my goals are, and due to my job, I got to know an entrepreneur from Portsmouth and his definition of being \u2018rich\/wealthy\u2019 changed after he\u2019d made himself a multi-millionaire and an international success. He makes it known that his money doesn\u2019t make him happy, it\u2019s his friends, family and the ability to give back and make a difference that makes him feel \u2018rich\u2019, similar to the themes of articles by (Voogd, 2014) and (Akinkugbe, 2016).<\/p>\n

This changed my definition of wealth, I\u2019ve decided that for me, being \u2018rich\u2019 would mean having the financial freedom to give my family the lives they want and to be able to travel and experience new things without constraints. Money is a measure of freedom and the quote, \u2018wealth is the ability to fully experience life\u2019 sums this up beautifully for being poor is more than just a lack of money, as explained by (Santos, 2014), \u201cpoverty is multi-dimensional\u201d. When time, friends, family and freedom coincide, only then would I feel I was truly rich. For others, they may decide that that being rich means something else entirely, however, there\u2019s no question that our definitions of \u2018rich\u2019 and \u2018poor\u2019 do change throughout our lives.<\/p>\n

Carl Hewitt studies <\/em>BSc Business Entrepreneurship<\/u> at Southampton business school. The views in this article are those of the author. This article is part of our \u2018Making Work Real\u2019 series. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exploring the theme of rich\/poor proved to be an extremely interesting and eye-opening experience. I looked into various ideas of being \u2018rich\u2019 to get a broader view of the theme, finding wide-ranging answers including two teenagers involved in the London riots suggesting owning any business makes you rich (McClatchey, 2011), yet endless Google results insist we need \u2018emotional wealth\u2019 and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99273,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1030568],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-making-work-real","column","threecol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=950"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":952,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions\/952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}