“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread”*…
We stand at the precipice if we don’t re-evaluate our understanding of poverty and inequality. The narrative in the neo-liberal west is that if you work hard, things work out. If things don’t work out, we have the tendency to blame the victim, leaving them without any choices. Brexit, Le Pen, and the defeat of Hillary Clinton are examples of the cracks that result from inequality and poverty, symptoms of my childhood experience writ large. The Piketty pitchforks are out, and the march to global disorder can only be arrested by adopting measures that begin to price in the stacked deck that I and anyone else born into deep poverty sees, and resents.
I believe we will see the Italian Five Star Movement submit a referendum to leave the EU this year, and that Marine Le Pen has better than even odds of winning the French election. The EU is in danger of buckling under a globalist defeat and may exist in name only two years from now.
These trends are being accelerated by the blind belief that the poor have failed to seize the opportunities that the market or globalization has created. This myth deserves to be taken off life support—and the emerging, empirical, and carefully observed science of poverty can help us do so if we pay it the attention it deserves…
A powerful plea for a fundamental re-understanding of the economic inequality that vexes our society, and of the myth of meritocracy that has helped sustain it: “Why Poverty Is Like a Disease.”
* Mahatma Gandhi
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As we agree with FDR that “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little,” we might recall that this date in 1907 was “Bloody Tuesday.” The San Francisco streetcar strike, which had begun two days earlier, erupted into violence when armed strikebreakers fired into an angry crowd of strike supporters. Soon armed strike sympathizers returned fire. 2 died; 20 were injured.
Armed strike breaker, left, shoots into the crowd on Bloody Tuesday, May 7, 1907. The original caption in The San Francisco Examiner said that “Photographer Coleman” took the picture “the moment before the man running beside him was fatally shot.”