Posts Tagged ‘poverty’
“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”*…
The image above captures the received wisdom about extreme poverty and the way that it has declined over the last couple of centuries. But Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel would have us take a longer view, suggesting that the story is neither so simple nor so laudatory as we might assume…
Highlights:
• The common notion that extreme poverty is the “natural” condition of humanity and only declined with the rise of capitalism rests on income data that do not adequately capture access to essential goods.
•Data on real wages suggests that, historically, extreme poverty was uncommon and arose primarily during periods of severe social and economic dislocation, particularly under colonialism.
• The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality.
• In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, wages and/or height have still not recovered.
• Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began only around the 20th century. These gains coincide with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements.
“Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century.” By way of context, Hickel is a “degrowth” advocate. In any case, the data is arresting– and surely worth pondering.
* Confucius
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As we dig deeper, and lest we think pre-capitalist life was Edenic, we might recall that it was on this date in 1381 that “boy-King” Richard II met with the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt (AKA Wat Tyler‘s Rebellion or the Great Rising), which had arisen for a variety of reasons, including the socio-economic and political tensions generated by the Black Death in the 1340s and the high taxes resulting from the conflict with France during the Hundred Years’ War.
At the meeting, Richard acceded to some of their demands– most notably, the abolition of serfdom. But after he had the opportunity to gather his forces, he put the rebellion down, rounded up the leaders (some of whom were executed; others imprisoned)… and re-instituted serfdom.
“Many a person will forget the past for a present”*…
… and many won’t, as Benjamin Errett explains…
… Do consider where many gifts end up: The fulskåp, defined in The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning as “a cupboard full of gifts you can’t stand to look at, and which are impossible to regift. Usually these are presents from distant aunts and uncles that you put on display when the giver comes to visit.”
The perfect gift for the person who has everything is either penicillin or a burglar alarm, as the old jokes have it. So there’s always the option of deliberately flubbing the gesture with a gag gift, which is what the British royal family reportedly does. Prince Harry once delighted the Queen with a shower cap that read “Ain’t life a bitch.”…
You shouldn’t have: “The Wit’s Guide to Gifts, ” from @benjaminerrett.
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As we wrap it up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 that UNICEF (the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) was launched. Among the most widespread and recognizable social welfare organizations in the world, with a presence in 192 countries and territories, it provides immunizations and disease prevention, administers treatment for children and mothers with HIV, enhances childhood and maternal nutrition, improves sanitation, promotes education, and provides emergency relief in response to disasters (most recently, e.g., the COVID epidemic and the invasion of the Ukraine).
“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”*…
In America, average income has been basically flat for five decades as economic gains increasingly go to a tiny minority at the top of the income bracket. But American wage stagnation is only a small part of a larger global story — one that is summarized in a fascinating new graph. Swedish statistics professor Michael Höhle put together a fascinating visualization of the distribution of incomes, adjusted for inflation, in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe between 1950 and 2015.
It’s rare to find a data visualization with so much information in it. You could watch this over and over and over again and notice a new thing every time. Two big trends, for instance, are the increase in population in Asia over time, and the huge improvements in real income for Asians since 1950. Another less obvious trend is that European incomes more or less stopped gaining ground in the 1990s. Then there’s the disturbing thickening of African incomes on the left side of the graph starting around 2000, representing so many people who’ve been left behind by global economic growth…
Höhle is visualizing date from Factfulness, the last book from the late (and dearly missed) Hans Rosling (see here, here, and here). Read more at “A Fascinating Visualization Of How Income Has Changed Around The World Since 1950” and learn more of Höhle’s method here.
* Confucius
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As we deliberate on distribution, we might send inclusive birthday greetings to Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Baron Desai; he was born on this date in 1940. An Indian-born U.K. economist and Labour politician, he is the first non-UK born candidate to stand for the position of Lord Speaker in the British House of Lords.
“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.”
“What a piece of work is a man!”*…
A two-minute look at demographics, habits, living conditions, and more if only 100 people lived on Earth in the same cultural and social patterns as the 7.4 billion who actually do:
[Happily, while most of the info here check out as solid, the poverty numbers in this video seem to be based on data from around 2012; things have got better since then: if 15 people in 100 spent $US1.90 a day or less in 2012, by 2015 that number was down to 10. Back in 1981, according to World Bank data, the corresponding number was over 40.]
* Shakespeare, Hamlet
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As we note that “it takes a village,” we might send carefully-observed birthday greetings to Gabriel Tarde; he was born on this date in 1843. A French sociologist, criminologist, and social psychologist, he conceived society as based on small psychological interactions (“intermental activity”) among individuals (much as if it were chemistry), the fundamental forces being imitation and innovation.
While this theory of social interaction– which emphasized the individual in an aggregate of persons– brought Tarde into conflict with Émile Durkheim (who conceived of society as a collective unity), Tarde had an formative influence on the thinking of psychologists and social theorists from Sigmund Freud to Everett Rogers. Now, for all his sins, Tarde seems to be in process of being re-discovered as a harbinger of postmodern French theory, particularly as influenced by the social philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
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