The Domestic Explanation Of The Trickle-Down Effect

Every week a man gets a wage packet and hides it from his wife who hides the fact from the children how he hides his wages from her. Every week he gives her just enough to keep his house in his estimation. She never knows how much he earns and can never find out. That is a secret hatched between the factory, him, and his work mates, a secret which the latter two parties like to forget daily on the way to the pub-the only entertainment fit for the detached Alpha Male.

But she knows that however much she looks after the house (which is in his name alone) and the children (who to himself he disowns, though he acknowledges them to her so she won't be openly offended) what he needs to deny is how household prices will always go up. This extorts her to make the money stretch further and heightens the art the poor have of concealing their ordinary and everyday poverty from themselves. In the long term this makes thrift surreal and genuine relief from poverty impossible-the covering up becomes more important than the intended effect of respite, even though respite would remove the need to cover up. As long as he gets his steak every Saturday as his treat with which to torment the family by feeding it to the cat when the the steak is cold, because he has had too much to drink that day* then all is well in the household and shall be forever. That poverty concealed is poverty maintained, and mothers conceal far more than they ever reveal about poverty by burying win/lose logic buried in unlistenable cliches about the past** is beside the point.

Amplify this story and you get to know how governments worldwide say they deal with their poorer citizenry and end up giving themselves more rights over their citizens than their citizens have over them. This makes poverty cheap to create and easy to maintain. This can be maintained as long the government are brazen enough and those they create poor enough that they cannot leave to where life might be better.


*My father did this every Saturday night for 25 years, always insisting that he was offered steak and always drinking too much because the the pub stayed open long enough at lunch time for him to come home feeling ill enough to take up a prime place in the house to rest in. His being ill made everyone very quiet and created quite an atmosphere.

**My mothers most personal subject of conversation was how she suffered for me when she was a teenager in WW2. The 'for me' bit was a classic guilt trip and like much false patriotism it worked very well. She suffered whilst men were dying in action in their thousands daily and vast landscapes were rendered sterile through bombing, and with much less complaint than she used. What she suffered was being given clothes by friends of her parents to get around the clothing ration, after which her parents friends' children would then point out to her the previous ownership of the clothing. She implied that her suffering was patriotic which to her meant that we had to do what she wanted. I now view it as how peer pressure becomes bullying amid relative poverty so far back from the front line that the only evidence that there was a war on was rationing.