So how do super-fortunate people like us get so mean-spirited that we resent our money going into aid? When did ''charity'' get a bad name? It seems we can live with a world of obscene disparities, as long as we imagine our lives, careers and successes are all our own work. If others struggle, that's their fault, their own mistakes, or lack of skills or work ethic. We are kidding ourselves. I have never seen prosperous Australians work as long and hard as I have seen Africans toil just to survive. People living in rural Africa struggle for everything we take for granted. Fetching water and firewood can involve a long walk every day. Our essential services - running water, sanitation, power and healthcare - are unattainable luxuries. Villagers get up before dawn and work until dark even when they are ill, which is often. Millions of Africans have to be resourceful (they make fine floors of polished dung), brave and resilient to survive in mud huts housing families with no visible means of support, save for some meagre crops and livestock if they're lucky. It's truly perverse to blame the world's poorest and most vulnerable people for their plight. What can impoverished villagers or slum dwellers do about poor national leadership, weak civic institutions and poisonous colonial legacies? Yet that doesn't stop many Australians from jealously denying the good that development aid does, by giving Third World children the platform of good health and education to make something of their lives.

Australians tend to do a good job playing down their head-start in life. Wealthier Australians win life's lottery not just by being born here, but by being born into families that provide an upbringing of good health and education plus valuable social networks. Yet you often hear people deplore lesser beings' ability to get good work when they owe their own careers and opportunities to such connections and to having started out with something to their name. How many of us really do it all on our own, without calling on any relatives or social and business contacts? (People who struggle to imagine the disadvantaged alternative would do well to read a New York Times article, ''How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment'', by Nancy Ditomaso.) Another eye-opening read is Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Report 2013, which details inequities that are plain unconscionable. If we were really as clever as we imagine, not to mention caring, we'd see in the statistics a denial of opportunity that is criminal in its stifling of human and economic potential and immoral in its creation of avoidable suffering. The bottom half of the world's people survive on barely 1 per cent of the world's wealth; the top 10 per cent hold 86 per cent of all assets. Net assets of $US4000 put a person in the better-off half. Just $US10,000 qualifies for the top third. Average Australian wealth per adult is 40 times that amount. Half our adult population is worth more than $US219,500, the highest median wealth in the world.

The benefits of such wealth are intergenerational. The Credit Suisse report finds ''across generations, the latest evidence points to more persistence'' among the nations and individuals who have it. People who discount inherited advantage need to consider this finding: ''Our analysis suggests that 10 generations or more have to lapse before the wealth of an individual in North America is completely independent of the wealth of their ancestors.'' This means that for those of us born advantaged, it is our natural environment; we know no other, nor do we realise how unusual it is. The Abbott government is cutting $4.5 billion from the aid budget over four years because politically it is safe to do so. In a world in which Australians are the most advantaged of all people, that's a depressing measure of national selfishness. As the world's most well-off people, we should gladly devote a tiny bit more of our taxes to helping the worst-off. Surely that was the thinking when the Howard government signed up to the Millennium Development Goal of putting 0.7 per cent of national income into aid. Yet Australia spends barely half of what it promised on aid, 37¢ of every $100 income, and is cutting that to 33¢. Cutting 4¢ in every $100 is equivalent to a weekly ''saving'' of 44¢ on the average Australian worker's income. Can we really not spare that? The aid cut looks even stingier when new Treasurer Joe Hockey can immediately find twice as much money to boost the Reserve Bank's capital reserves.

Yet our ''modest'' aid cut is a huge loss for the world's poor, 3 billion of whom earn less than 1 per cent of average Australian earnings. Even if some is wasted, our loose change makes so much more of a difference to their prospects than it could ever make to ours. Loading If we still insist we don't have money to spare, and anything we make is rightly ours to keep, then we are a self-deluded nation. We will never convince anyone but ourselves that good people can live such privileged, selfish lives. John Watson is a senior writer at The Age.