Finding out who we are with a few grains of rice

Oct 6 2008 By Sarah Evans

Three hundred and ninety seven billion pounds. It is a literally meaningless number. We are told that is what it takes to save the American financial system and it may well be but – really?

Financial observers around the world say it was a number pulled out of nowhere and a plan cobbled together in a few hours. But most people shrug their shoulders and would believe anything that promises to avert the threat of universal economic disaster that is driving the package forward.

It is a bit like the war of terror.

It doesn’t actually mean anything or at best means completely different things to different people but it’s scary enough to allow governments to do lots of things that otherwise would attract huge opposition.

To illuminate understanding of how much Northern Rock or Bradford & Bingley are costing to shore up, some commentators brake it down into what it will cost each taxpayer.

We can get our heads around that but the overall amounts seem like shifting sands depending of which financial expert pronounces.

The financial sector was supposed to be part of our new knowledge based economy.

Forward-looking people added value with their brilliant intelligence and that’s what will drive the economy forward as all the factories and mines shut down with no billion pound rescue packages on offer.

Any idea that you have to produce real things to earn money is silly antediluvian nonsense. The ability to guess future commodity prices on a world market and gamble with pension funds is what we should be educating our young to do.

Birmingham has as an aim, economic prosperity, among various others, – seems harmless enough. But unpick it a bit that you start to wonder.

Every since human beings started to write things down, it’s been obvious that wealth has not brought happiness. In any culture you care to think of, there are stories from the very beginning that tell the reverse story.

Wealth brings unhappiness or at best, a sort of half life. Endless contemporary research tells us the same.

Well-being, happiness, quality of life even, is not about having more and more money.

The gap between the rich and poor in this country and the US has increased, not decreased as you might expect if the vast fortunes of the few are supposed to percolate down and help everyone.

The wealth of the West is seen as a direct cause of extreme poverty in other parts of the world.

So perhaps less money and what there is differently distributed might make the very rich a bit happier and the very poor more comfortable.

But the numbers.

How can ordinary people in a democracy whose individual responsibility it is to understand these things, get their heads round the sort of numbers that are being bandied about in this current crisis.

One dynamic way of presenting statistics has been on show in Birmingham through September – Stan’s Cafe presents Of All the People in all the World.

This installation, in a warehouse in the Jewellery Quarter, (just behind that jewel itself, the RSBA gallery), shows what numbers mean by gathering a grain of rice for each person on the planet and subdividing the rice to represent a range of statistics.

You can see just how many children in this country are in poverty, how many people in South America live on less that one dollar a day, how many immigrants are living in Pakistan, how many babies are brought up in prison, how many people were smoking outside Birmingham Children’s Hospital one day in September and how many Chartists there were in Dudley.

On and on, the different size piles go, each simply labelled.

There is no comment. Just size and juxtaposition. The stark silent piles of white rice are disturbing and moving and indeed funny in places.

We must believe there are people who do grasp huge numbers, hope that those who control the financial world operate with some ethical underpinning.

But if people are going to understand for themselves and not be in thrall to whatever spin politicians and the media decide to present, we need different ways to engage everyone. We are all responsible for the decisions our politicians make.

Stan’s Cafe gives a refreshing perspective on who we really are.