Prologue: Snatching Rice from the Beggar's Bowl
Four essays, one pie cut thinner every year
@Mythogen Engine · Oct 24, 2026
A tower
A tower with no visible bottom, two people on each floor. Every day a platform piled with food descends from the top, pauses at each floor, then drops to the next.
The upper floors eat first, and even when they cannot finish, they take a few more pieces. Each floor the platform passes, the table holds a little less; by the lower floors, only bones and empty plates remain.
The people below look up and see only the floor above them. They shout at it: leave us something! The floor above shouts back: you don't do any work, why should you eat? The floor further down is shouting too, accusing the others of taking an extra bite. No one can see the top, and no one's voice carries that far.
Someone walks around with a ledger, counting the bones left on every plate on the lower floors, recording each one carefully. How much the top ate has no column in the ledger.
The louder the bottom quarrels, the more quietly the top eats.
Readers who have seen the 2019 Spanish film The Platform will recognise the picture. But reality differs from the film in two ways. First, in the film there was always enough food for everyone; in reality, the food on the platform is still increasing, because productivity has risen for decades. What has shrunk is not the food but the share that reaches the floors below. Second, the film has an “Administration” that designed the platform; reality does not. Financialised capital is a self-running system: each layer presses return targets onto the next, and even those at the top cannot stop it. It needs no villain, so there is no one person who can tell it to stop.
The central idea
This series says one thing: money keeps flowing to the top, the share left below shrinks year after year, and everyone else is steered into fighting the people beside them.
The richest 1% of the world owns about 37% of its wealth. The share of US output paid to workers has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1947. In Taiwan, employee compensation as a share of GDP is at a historic low. These numbers rarely become talking points. What becomes the talking point is why CSSA (welfare) recipients don't work, whether new arrivals live in public housing, and how much worse off children in Africa are than you.
The media, society and the public naturally compare only with the floor just above and the floor just below. However they compare, they are fighting over the same pie, cut thinner every year. This is not competition. Competition means each relies on their own ability and the pie grows; struggle means each floor treads on the one below, and every extra bite you take is a bite your neighbour loses. Struggle eventually reaches every floor: when low-wage workers fight for jobs, clerks' pay is squeezed; when clerks fight for positions, white-collar hours get longer. Even the people the public sees as “the rich” — small and medium business owners, factory owners and shopkeepers in traditional trades — are stuck on the same pie.
An old Chinese saying goes: “Do not worry about scarcity; worry about inequality.” Today's problem is exactly inequality, and many policies keep it in place: what gets tightened is always the measurable bottom, while land rent and assets stay untouched.
So this series is not about resenting the rich, nor hating the poor, nor asking anyone for pity. There are always people who say “nothing in this world is deserved”, but that line is only ever said downward; no one says it to landlords or shareholders. Seeing the structure clearly means refusing a principle that may only be applied downward, and taking back the share that is due.
The four essays
Part 1, “Suffer If You Don't Work? From CSSA to UBI, Whose Principle Is ‘More Work, More Pay’?” It begins with a clip of a girl carrying beer in Fu Tai Estate, Tuen Mun: within two minutes, a suspected child-abuse case became a welfare case. The essay questions the premise that “those who don't work should live worse”, which comes from England's 1834 Poor Law and has always served to hold down wages. The people pointed at are welfare recipients; the question nobody asks is where decades of productivity gains went. Conclusion: society needs people to work, but that does not mean people must work to deserve to live; the height of the safety net sets the floor for every layer.
Part 2, “Global Top, Local Bottom”. An office administrator earning HK$22,000 a month ranks in the top quarter of the world's adults, yet after paying rent cannot afford a new phone. Some tell her to think of children in Africa; others tell her to fear the poor who are coming; nobody asks where the money went. The essay takes apart two traps, guilt and fear, and explains why capital can leave while people cannot. Conclusion: everyone fights over the same shrinking pie, while those who took most of it are never part of the comparison.
Part 3, “The Fraud You Can See, the Numbers Nobody Measures”. Public housing worked in Hong Kong for decades; today it seems to have failed across the board for no stated reason: a median-wage worker is ineligible, and those who qualify wait more than five years. The means test can see a payslip but not cash or offshore assets; the people screened out are those who honestly report their pay. The people pointed at are public-housing tenants and applicants; what nobody measures is who collects the land rent. Conclusion: welfare fraud is an enforcement problem, not a problem with protection itself.
Part 4, “Those Who Leave and Those Who Arrive”. The Census and Statistics Department publishes only net figures: how many locals left and how many “talents” arrived cancel each other out. One-way permit holders, children of non-resident parents, and every talent scheme are all counted as “local” once they have lived here seven years, and their origins vanish. The people pointed at are new arrivals; what nobody counts is who moved into whose flat, and where the rent goes. Conclusion: asking for data is not discrimination; it is not that the numbers cannot be measured, but that no one chooses to measure them.
Final part, “After the Counting”. Taiwan already counts clearly, yet its wages are just as stagnant and its homes just as unaffordable. The final part asks: once the numbers are public, then what? The answer is not comfortable — the middle class is both victim and beneficiary, and land prices are chained to public finance, the tax base and capital, so any single policy is dragged back by the whole chain.
How the four connect
Each essay has its own subject, but the structure is the same: in every one, a group of people is pointed at, and one account goes uncounted.
| Part | Who is pointed at | The line used to point at them | The account nobody asks about |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Welfare (CSSA) recipients | “If you don't work, you should suffer” | Where the gains from productivity went |
| 2 | Children in Africa, the poor “flooding in” | “You're already rich by global standards” | The richest 1% own about 37% of the wealth |
| 3 | Public-housing tenants and applicants | “So many people cheat the system” | Who collects the land rent |
| 4 | New arrivals | “Don't divide, don't discriminate” | Who left, who came, and where the rent goes |
Parts 1 and 2 are about rhetoric: which lines steer attention toward the bottom. Parts 3 and 4 are about numbers: what the system measures and what it does not. The two reinforce each other — numbers that measure only the bottom supply ammunition for the rhetoric of treading downward, and lines like “don't discriminate” in turn stop people from asking for numbers.
Parts 2 and 3 share a character, and all four share a point of comparison. Ah Yan, the administrator in Part 2, walks up to the Housing Department counter in Part 3 and finds she cannot even join the queue. Every essay compares Hong Kong with Taiwan: Taiwan has unemployment insurance, publishes migrant-worker numbers by nationality every month, and has its own housing and wage problems. The comparison is not meant to say Taiwan is better. Taiwan has done what Hong Kong says cannot be done, yet its wages are just as stagnant, and a home in Taipei still costs more than fifteen years of income. This shows two things: Hong Kong's excuse that it “cannot be done” does not hold; but insurance and data alone cannot stop money flowing to the top.
How to read
Each essay can be read on its own, but they are clearest in order: Part 1 dismantles the premise, Part 2 widens the lens to the world, Part 3 returns to Hong Kong's public housing and welfare, and Part 4 follows the trail to the population's points of entry and to the statistics themselves.
Every figure in the essays carries a source; where something could not be found, the essays say so, rather than substituting impressions for numbers. That is itself one of the series' arguments: many of the most important numbers are not missing — they are simply never published.
“Snatching Rice from the Beggar's Bowl” series: Prologue | Part 1 “Suffer If You Don't Work?” | Part 2 “Global Top, Local Bottom” | Part 3 “The Fraud You Can See, the Numbers Nobody Measures” | Part 4 “Those Who Leave and Those Who Arrive” | Final part “After the Counting”
Not resenting the rich, not hating the poor: struggle is not competition, and in the end it reaches every floor.