CAN you visualise what it means to be filthy, stinking rich in Scotland? Here’s one way to think about it. Imagine you meet a genie who puts a shiny £1 coin in your pocket for every second that passes. Tick, tock, two seconds go by, and you’ve just made £2 sitting on your arse.

Pretty soon, your life would get much, much better. In just one hour you would have £3,600, already more than the total annual income of someone living on the bottom rung of benefits. After one day of genie-filled pockets, you would have £86,400, enough to buy a shiny new Porsche 911 Carrera. Give it two more days and you could also own a moderately luxurious flat in a posher suburb of Glasgow or Edinburgh. Give it a week, and you’re rich beyond any ordinary person’s wildest dreams.

And every second, tick, tock, new pound coins are spilling into your pocket. After a year you’ve got £31.5m of unearned income. It sounds like a crazy dream. You could never spend all these pounds, even if you lived four lifetimes.

Nevertheless, even if you did meet this genie, you’d have to wait a long time to get properly super-rich. At the rate of being gifted £1 every second, you’d need to live 31 years to equal the wealth of Scottish billionaires like Sir Ian Wood, Sir Brian Souter and Ann Gloag, or Jim McColl. You’d have to wait four more decades to match the Grant-Gordon family, and by that time, most of us will be dead.

This £1 genie metaphor isn’t mine. I’ve borrowed it – in modified form – from ‘Why We Can’t Afford the Rich’, an excellent book by Andrew Sayer, Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy at Lancaster University. And that’s the question I want to pose Scotland’s politicians. In the 21st century, can we afford the rich?

One problem, as I hope the genie example helped illustrate, is that we are totally unable to visualise how unequal our societies have become.

Some statistics can help illustrate this. In research for Ipsos MORI, the public were asked how they thought wealth should be distributed in Britain between the richest 20 per cent, the next richest, and so on, all the way down to the poorest fifth. People replied that the richest should own 32 per cent of wealth, and the poorest should – in an ideal world – own 13 per cent. In other words, people have been forced to accept the mainstream idea that some inequality is necessary.

Crucially, the public were also asked what they thought the actual distribution of wealth in Britain was like. They believed that, in practice, the richest owned 39 per cent and the poorest 10 per cent. In other words, people think Britain is more unequal than they would like it to be. But the real kicker is when we compare these opinion poll numbers to the actual reality. Because, in Britain, the richest fifth of society own 62 per cent of wealth – double what the public wants to see, and significantly more than they believe to be the case. And it’s worse at the other end of the spectrum. Remember, the public believe that the poorest fifth own 10 per cent of the wealth, and they would like to see them own 13 per cent. In reality, the bottom rung have access to less than 1 per cent of Britain’s assets.

So two things are clear. First, the media and our education system have done a pretty shoddy job of explaining our economy to citizens. The true extent of injustice in society remains hidden from the voting public. But still, the public intuitively sense that something is wrong with our system of wealth creation. We know things are going in the wrong direction.

And Ipsos MORI’s research showed other things. Once people knew the true extent of the wealth gap, 72 per cent of British voters supported maximum salaries and restrictions on bonuses, and 70 per cent supported increased taxes on those earning £150,000 and above. What a pity, then, that our institutions relentlessly misinform people about the facts.

There’s been endless propaganda about how rich people create the wealth in society. We’re taught to admire the rich as role models, to envy their success, even if, as in the case of Paris Hilton, it’s somewhat dubiously acquired.

But it’s not just about admiring their glamour and success. Ultimately, we’ve been told to fear rich people too. Politically, we’re taught that anything less than snivelling deference to the richest one per cent will cause them all to run away like spooked horses. Nobody fears old-fashioned trade union strikes any more – repressive laws have seen to that. But rich people, we’re told, strike all the time, and the best thing is to bow down to their demands before they’ve even got a chance to make them. Because, ultimately, we’re told, they create the wealth, and we all milk them like so many teats.

I understand the fear, but submitting to fear is irresponsible political leadership, because rich people are draining Western societies. They are one of the chief causes of our present crisis. They benefit from unearned wealth through dividends, capital gains, interest and rent. The spoiled lifestyles they grant to themselves and their children are wasteful and pointless, diverting resources from better uses. And their carbon footprint is massively excessive. So, rather than worry about them bolting off, we should be thinking about whether we can really afford to keep them.

Of all the terrifying statistics about the one per cent, here’s the one that should give us nightmares. The wealthiest global elite own 65 times more wealth than the bottom 3.6 billion combined. Can you imagine how unequal that is? I admit it, I can’t.

As Sayer insists in his book, it’s not about envying the rich. That’s trivial and petty. It’s about rising above the sort of society that rewards a tiny fraction of people with sums of money that nobody could possibly hope to spend. Future generations will remember two types of politician. Those who built careers by surrendering to the wealthy one per cent, and those who spoke out and took a stand. What should a truly responsible politician do?