All "cures" for poverty have one thing in common - an obsession with wealth.
Inequality, competition and an obsession with wealth and rank appear to be both self-perpetuating and destined to sow despair.
The frantic obsession with wealth accumulation in India, often euphemised as "development", Modi's selling point, has also widened a dangerous economic gap between the middle and working classes.
And so do the members of his hydra-headed family with its great uncles and second cousins, its Swithins, Eustaces and Winifreds, its loyal retainers, black sheep, obsession with wealth and propriety and, above all, its hypocrisy.
In the context of a phone conversation about modern England with a New York journalist, we both bemoaned the rise of bad reality TV shows and the obsession with wealth and celebrity that has gripped parts of our culture.
The Original Soundtrack, every bit as cinematic as the title suggests; Deceptive Bends, a brave attempt to rescue things after Kevin Godley and Lol Creme abruptly left; and Sheet Music, experimental, funny, beautiful in parts, bawdy in others, songs that satirise the world of 1974 with its oil shocks and aircraft hijackings and incipient obsession with wealth and high finance.
He dismissed Christmas as "sour, moth-eaten, bilious, crapulous, worm-eaten and mildewed" and denounced America for its obsessions with wealth and power.
You have only to think of the wall-to-wall auctions on daytime TV, Dragon's Den, the Apprentice and the myriad forms of career-making competition the medium celebrates, the generalised obsession with fame and wealth, the pervasive sense, in watching it, that life is somewhere other than where you are, to see why this might be.
Although we live in a country with an unhealthy obsession with status and wealth, whether you're in a Pinto or a Porsche, wearing a hoodie or Helmut Lang, when the law comes down on you, you're still a nigger.
Not long thereafter, in his 1830s foundational text on the political spirit of early American, Democracy in America, Alexis de Toquiville could not get over the country's obsession with equality, not wealth accumulation.
In the bible, Mark 8 36, it states: "For what shall it profit a woman, if she shall gain the whole world, and lose her own soul?" In the United States we have an obsession with celebrity and wealth.
