Who hails the get-up-and-go spirit of the beggar on 50k a year?

The right is usually keen to champion entrepreneurs, but there's disdain for hard-working London beggar Simon Wright

• 
• • Stephen Moss
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 15.29 BST

Young person homeless, hungry and begging in London. Photograph: Alamy

There is a famous story in advertising folklore about David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy and Mather and one of the pioneers of the modern ad business. He was going down Fifth Avenue in New York and came across a blind man begging. The beggar had a sign: "I am blind, please help." But no one was helping – the beggar's hat was empty.

Ogilvy could have given him a dollar, but instead he did something more useful. He rewrote the beggar's sign. Now it read: "It is spring, and I am blind." The nickels and dimes poured in. Ogilvy had replaced a simple request for action with a story; he had added emotion to the man's appeal. People empathised with someone who could not fully partake of this most glorious season, and put their hands in their pockets.

I thought of the tale – some dispute its authenticity, but let that pass – when I read about Simon Wright, the beggar in Putney, south-west London, who has just been handed an asbo to stop him begging anywhere in London. Wright was probably Britain's most successful beggar, earning ("raking in" in the Mail's emotive language) £50,000 a year, living in a "smart" council flat, and spending his money in betting shops and amusement arcades.

In assessing the rights and wrongs of the case, one would really need to see the sign he was using. If, as the police say, he was claiming to be homeless, that is clearly misrepresentation – he needed an Ogilvy to produce a sign that was both effective and true. He also had a dog which some local people say was intimidating, but that sounds like an attempt to spice up the tale. Successful beggars' dogs usually look like they are in urgent need of some Winalot.

Leaving aside the specifics of whether the sign did perpetrate a fraud, the bigger point seems to be the old British story that we resent success – the "tall poppy syndrome" theMail generally likes to whine about. Wright was a man at the top of his profession, the ultimate advertising success story: someone who had cracked the puzzle of how to make a lot of people give you something for nothing. But that was his problem. People resented his success. No one can tolerate a successful beggar. Beggars really aren't allowed to be choosers. He had to be put back in his box.

The right is usually keen to champion hard-working entrepreneurs, so why be so sniffy about begging? It's a perfect market: we encounter many beggars; we can't give to them all, even if we would like to; so they have to be astute in their choice of location and the way they make their appeal. Ogilvy realised this: he produced a brilliant piece of advertising in a very demanding commercial sector. How do you make a passing stranger part with money for absolutely nothing other than a warm feeling inside?

Wright had chosen the perfect location: affluent Putney. He positioned himself near a bank, so people taking out £50 would feel guilty when they saw him. And he worked very hard. Even the police had to admit he was a Stakhanovite. "He worked pretty much every day, and had done so for about three years," they said. "He certainly put in the hours." His success produced a host of imitators – nine other beggars invaded his patch – but he saw them off, the original and the best, the No 1 begging brand on the block.

Here, then, was a man whose industry and commercial acumen would, you might think, be celebrated in coalition Britain. He was earning a decent income (presumably tax free because it was a gift) and putting a lot of cash back into the local economy. He should probably have been given some sort of business initiative award. Instead, he has been stripped of his livelihood, will now be on benefits, and is threatened with prison if he begs again. From being a substantial net contributor to GDP – goodness know what his £50,000 was generating if we take the Keynesian multiplier into account – he has become a drain on the national purse. And we wonder why the public finances are in a mess.

Why the politics of envy are keenest among the very rich

Essential public services are cut in order that the wealthy may pay less tax. But even their baubles don't make them happy

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 6 May 2013 20.29 BST

Saudi Prince Alwaleed is said to have been near tears when Forbes reported his wealth at £7bn less than he calculated it. Photograph: Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters

'I never did anything for money. I never set money as a goal. It was a result." So says Bob Diamond, formerly the chief executive of Barclays. In doing so Diamond lays waste to the justification that his bank and others (and their innumerable apologists in government and the media) have advanced for surreal levels of remuneration – to incentivise hard work and talent. Prestige, power, a sense of purpose: for them, these are incentives enough.

Others of his class – Bernie Ecclestone and Jeroen van der Veer (the former chief executive of Shell), for example – say the same. The capture by the executive class of so much wealth performs no useful function. What the very rich appear to value is relative income. If executives were all paid 5% of current levels, the competition between them (a questionable virtue anyway) would be no less fierce. As the immensely rich HL Huntcommented several decades ago: "Money is just a way of keeping score."

The desire for advancement along this scale appears to be insatiable. In March Forbes magazine published an article about Prince Alwaleed, who, like other Saudi princes, doubtless owes his fortune to nothing more than hard work and enterprise. According to one of the prince's former employees, the Forbes magazine global rich list "is how he wants the world to judge his success or his stature".

The result is "a quarter-century of intermittent lobbying, cajoling and threatening when it comes to his net worth listing". In 2006, the researcher responsible for calculating his wealth writes, "when Forbes estimated that the prince was actually worth $7 billion less than he said he was, he called me at home the day after the list was released, sounding nearly in tears. 'What do you want?' he pleaded, offering up his private banker in Switzerland. 'Tell me what you need.'"

Never mind that he has his own 747, in which he sits on a throne during flights. Never mind that his "main palace" has 420 rooms. Never mind that he possesses his own private amusement park and zoo – and, he claims, $700m worth of jewels. Never mind that he's the richest man in the Arab world, valued by Forbes at $20bn, and has watched his wealth increase by $2bn in the past year. None of this is enough. There is no place of arrival, no happy landing, even in a private jumbo jet. The politics of envy are never keener than among the very rich.

This pursuit can suck the life out of its adherents. In Lauren Greenfield's magnificent documentary The Queen of Versailles, David Siegel – "America's timeshare king" – appears to abandon all interest in life as he faces the loss of his crown. He is still worth hundreds of millions. He still has an adoring wife and children. He is still building the biggest private home in America.

But as the sale of the skyscraper that bears his name and symbolises his pre-eminence begins to look inevitable, he sinks into an impenetrable depression. Dead-eyed, he sits alone in his private cinema, obsessively rummaging through the same pieces of paper, as if somewhere among them he can find the key to his restoration, refusing to engage with his family, apparently prepared to ruin himself rather than lose the stupid tower.

In order to grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is reconfigured. The welfare state is dismantled. Essential public services are cut so that the rich may pay less tax. The public realm is privatised, the regulations restraining the ultra-wealthy and the companies they control are abandoned, and Edwardian levels of inequality are almost fetishised.

Politicians justify these changes, when not reciting bogus arguments about the deficit, with the incentives for enterprise that they create. Behind that lies the promise or the hint that we will all be happier and more satisfied as a result. But this mindless, meaningless accumulation cannot satisfy even its beneficiaries, except perhaps – and temporarily – the man wobbling on the very top of the pile.

The same applies to collective growth. Governments today have no vision but endless economic growth. They are judged not by the number of people in employment – let alone by the number of people in satisfying, pleasurable jobs – and not by the happiness of the population or the protection of the natural world. Job-free, world-eating growth is fine, as long as it's growth. There are no ends any more, just means.

In their interesting but curiously incomplete book, How Much is Enough?, Robert and Edward Skidelsky note that "Capitalism rests precisely on this endless expansion of wants. That is why, for all its success, it remains so unloved. It has given us wealth beyond measure, but has taken away the chief benefit of wealth: the consciousness of having enough ... The vanishing of all intrinsic ends leaves us with only two options: to be ahead or to be behind. Positional struggle is our fate."

They note that the nations with the longest working hours – the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy, in the graph of OECD nations they publish in the book – are those with the greatest inequality. They might have added that they are also the three with the lowest levels of social mobility.

Four possible conclusions could be drawn. The first is that inequality does indeed encourage people to work harder, as the Skidelskys (and various neoliberals) maintain: the bigger the gap, the more some people will strive to try to close it. Or perhaps it's just that more people, swamped by poverty and debt, are desperate. An alternative explanation is that economic and political inequality sit together: in more unequal nations, bosses are able to drive their workers harder. The fourth possible observation is that the hard work inequality might stimulate neither closes the gap nor enhances social mobility.

Nor, it seems, does it make us, collectively, any wealthier. The Dutch earn an average of $42,000 per capita on 1,400 hours a year, the British $36,000 on 1,650 hours. Inequality, competition and an obsession with wealth and rank appear to be both self-perpetuating and destined to sow despair.

Can we not rise above this? To seek satisfactions that don't cost the earth and might be achievable? The principal aim of any wealthy nation should now be to say: "Enough already".