Is It Better to Be Poor in Bangladesh or the Mississippi Delta?
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If I compare my upbringing with my daughter's, there is nothing to compare. We walked around barefoot, unsupervised, climbed trees, ate wild fruit, made spears from wood and once you were four you had to take your two year old sibling with you and look after them. There were no nannies. Here is the interesting thing, none of us ever had to see an occupational therapist to help us with our hand eye co-ordination. Falling out of a tree was enough incentive to figure it out on your own. I digress, the point I am trying to make is that I remember my childhood as a happy time. Full of activity and adventure. I would have been classified as poor because I we slept on the floor, shared blankets as kids. Kids ate from the same plate, grouped roughly by age group. No toys except ones we made ourselves.
I am not advocating returning to the village. Running water and healthcare are good things. I often wonder about who is better off, me in town with access to water and health but with all manner of rates and taxes and social pressures?
Edit: typos
The interesting thing is how easy it is to adapt and to also get caught up in the environment you are in. Suddenly the next great framework is the thing that occupies your mind the most. At that moment I am just like any other person in IT. I go home once a year because it keeps me grounded. Makes me realise I have come far but life is a bit slower there and people have genuine smiles but own less.
That's a great observation. I think it's hard to argue that someone happy in their life is not successful just because they haven't advanced economically.
Great link. The Onion rarely disappoints.
And yet, somehow the sum of hundreds of such benefits (secure food, healthcare, fire departments, internet) doesn't lead to a significant increase in average happiness. In fact it may be that we in the west are less happy than people living in stone age societies.
People in the village are not immune from wanting more but the pace is slower. They are more patient. They exercise, not by going to gym but walking 10km to say hello to a neighbor then walking back. Food is organic, all cows eat grass and roam free. Little of the food is highly processed. They also manually process their food. The thought of spending half a day pounding millet for supper has me getting so impatient and thinking surely there is a better way. They have accepted.
Sorry I went on a bit of a rant, but this is topic close to my heart.
I dunno if this makes any sense, just something that popped into my head.
For the same reason, I imagine the poor in Benjamin Franklin's time might find a Native American lifestyle (if accepted by the group) to have some draw if exposed to it. I would by the same measure expect the middle and upper classes to find it less appealing.
1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/3315638...
2: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?um=1&ie=UTF-8&lr&cites=37...
We moved to town which is 60km (40miles) away when my dad got a job working in a mine. From then I went to school in town and only spent holidays in the village. To this day we still own our own cows and our home still stands.
To answer your questions, yes more than half my relatives are still in the same village. We talking a village of 60 odd people. I organise a gathering every other Christmas, we slaughter a cow (apologies to the sensitive) and talk about the good old days.
Times have changed even in the village. Everyone has a cellphone even in the village :-).
Survivorship bias. I have poor eyesight, no amount of practice would ever allow me to throw a spear and hit a wild animal. Heck with lots of occupational therapy as a kid, I can kinda-sorta catch a ball. On a good day.
I'll say that falling out of trees was a lot easier (even fun!) as a kid though. I do worry that the current generation doesn't have much unstructured play time.
> We walked around barefoot, unsupervised, climbed trees, ate wild fruit, made spears from wood and once you were four you had to take your two year old sibling with you and look after them.
Growing up working class in 80s and early 90s suburbia was awfully similar. Except we had to wear shoes when it got too hot, concrete is friendly to cars, not feet. :( But yeah, we ran around all summer day long without parents getting involved. The littler kids were looked after (dragged home for diaper changes though!), we road bikes all around, picked berries from the woods, got hatchets and chopped down small trees to make clearings in the woods.
Now days? I am not quite sure what childhood is like for the current generation. I know that I've see less and less groups of kids running around every year, and I haven't really seen any in the last few years, but maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.
What, specifically, is your eyesight problem? There's some growing suggestive evidence that our eyes need time outside in bright sunlight to develop properly. Depending on your particular sight problem, it may very well be the case that a failure to be outside attempting to throw a spear and hit a wild animal as a child is the cause of your problem.
https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/time-outdoors...
I'm missing an optic nerve. Sunlight isn't going to fix that. :)
Remember, hunter gathers don't need to read tiny text, or the pattern of bark on a tree. So, even what we think of as poor vision was actually often 'good enough'.
Also, as others have noted, there is survivorship bias in your experience. If you or one of your siblings were born with a disability or became disabled in some way from a sickness, the experience would probably be quite bad.
Alot of the adaptation happened as a kid. I went to school not knowing a word of English. I don't even know how I learnt the language. Kids adapt. They are less self conscious. So I guess every new environment was new for as long as it took to adapt.
Like you, I also wonder the same - fancy electronics, cars, running water etc are all great, but how much of it truly contribute to one's laughter, happiness, health etc?
I think there are two reasons for it:
1) People don't seem to be as mobile, in general, and you'll find 3 generations of family living very close to each other quite often. I was hanging out with a local in Leon, Nicaragua and met like a dozen of her family members walking around a couple of blocks. People who are having hard times seem to just take up with family. We found one drunk lying on the side of the road, and she insisted we stop and find out what was wrong with him and take him back to his family. I had barely registered that he was there.
2) There don't seem to be as many zoning or construction safety laws, so building a shelter by yourself with almost no money seems to be quite easy. It might be a shack on the side of the road with no water or electricity, but it's better than sleeping on the street.
I was also struck by how jovial even people with very little seemed to be. Like having cable tv, food, friends and family was enough for people to be satisfied with where they are with life. They also seemed relatively fatalistic about health and safety issues. When you don't really have any expectation that someone is looking out for you, the idea that you could die from an accident or sickness any day doesn't seem to be that unlikely. People there in general just seem to take it in stride. I guess you have to if you want to get out of bed in the morning.
I think it made me realize that loneliness might be worse than poverty, and that the lack of social support for poor people in the us is worse than the lack of money. We could do more for people by creating social connections than we could be just giving them a check. I don't really know what the answer is there. I don't think it's a problem at either the market or government can solve.
It is also possible for a whole family to live in two rooms. I don't come from a family that does that but it happens. Everyone sleeping on the floor with a bed for the parents.
Even just watching a documentary doesn't really capture the scale of it like spending three months traveling from town to town and seeing nothing but abject poverty every where you go. You really do get an understanding of why people risk their lives to come to the US.
But some things certainly are a matter of perspective. My grandmother was one of 13 kids, 12 of which survived early childhood. The way she describes it, they all lived in one three-bedroom house in a steel town: one bedroom for the parents, one for the girls, and one for the boys.
So, 14 people in a house that, assuming it was an average-sized house from that era that you see in these parts, was probably about 1,200-1,500 square feet. That'd be pretty unthinkable to your average American today (outside of NYC/SF, anyways).
"Keeping up with the Joneses", coupled with a lot of land, probably our economic policies, and other factors, has certainly moved the needle on what an acceptable home looks like.
The people in the country consider us city-people to be wimps who can’t do anything to help ourselves. You need some shelter? Then build a shelter.
But in the city you can’t, because you need to get an architect’s sign-off and the unelected Planning Commission’s approval, and do endless studies about the environment and neighborhood character.
Some of the restrictions I feel are useful. Seismic regulations, because look at the difference between Christchurch, New Zealand and Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Electrical and fire, because just a couple months ago a block away a house caught on fire and I had no fear.
Some of the restrictions I feel are harmful. Zoning laws rooted in racism. Neighborhood preservation laws that do more long-term harm than they were trying to prevent. “Local control” that takes away power from the people and gives it to unelected bureaucrats.
> But just as such a community realizes the conditions which all civilized communities are striving for, and advances in the scale of material progress—just as closer settlement and a more intimate connection with the rest of the world, and greater utilization of labor-saving machinery, make possible greater economies in production and exchange, and wealth in consequence increases, not merely in the aggregate, but in proportion to population—so does poverty take a darker aspect. Some get an infinitely better and easier living, but others find it hard to get a living at all. The "tramp" comes with the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of "material progress" as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches. Upon streets lighted with gas and patrolled by uniformed policemen, beggars wait for the passer-by, and in the shadow of college, and library, and museum, are gathering the more hideous Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied.
He identified the reason for it as being the higher value of scarce lands in the midst of progress, and the tendency of private ownership in land to make this inevitable. To take your example from (2) ― if the land on the side of the road demanded great payments for its use, good luck building a shelter there. (This goes hand-in-hand with zoning laws, one of the tools wielded by the landowning class, but which didn't exist in George's day.)
[0] http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/George/grgPP1.html
I will say the events of the last year have definitely opened my eyes to the situation. The thing I've noticed is that it actually is harder to sympathize with the white, rural poor than it is with the inner-city minorities, at least for me - even though I want to sympathize and I acknowledge their suffering is probably more or less equal to the inner-city minority poor. I suppose the reason I find it more difficult to feel equivalent sympathy is that it's hard to get over the fact that the white rural poor seem to constantly cling to counter-productive political/world-views that perpetuate their poverty and act against their interests. I mean it's just really hard to allocate significant sympathy towards a large voting-bloc that seems to blame all their problems on terrorism and immigration. But then again, perhaps I am generalizing - I mean I'm just a clueless liberal living in my NYC bubble so what do I know anyway?
I mostly share the liberal worldview.
There's a double annoyance with inner city residents, though, in that many just expect the government to solve the problems, leaving them without motivation. Almost robbing them of it in some cases. Anyone working hard towards their dreams, no matter how large or small, will naturally resent such mentalities.
[0] Do the people you are referring to actually live in the inner city?
The thing is...they're right. Because they live so far from any place that matters, no one who matters thinks about their situation, so it's much more difficult to leave rural America than it is to leave the inner city.
I kind of find the latter approach more constructive, in fact, even if it resulted in Trump.
So inner-city populations can't reliably make themselves heard on the national level via Presidential elections.
(Another thing I have a hard time understanding is that Americans allow people to vote even if they have no ID. Over here, it's a basic requirement for democracy that only those vote who have the right to vote, and they each vote only once.)
I know this to be true in North Carolina, and various readings about elsewhere make me believe it to be the case for the greater US.
The Electoral College doesn't 'reduce the weight of votes coming from inner-cities and urban areas'; it allocates votes to states in roughly proportion to population.
Voting by states doesn't just 'exclude votes coming from urban areas that lie within a larger, Republican-leaning state,' but also excludes votes from conservatives living in Democratic states, e.g. California.
> probably most people in Philadelphia voted for Clinton, but their votes were nullified because the state over-all went to Trump.
Their votes weren't nullified any more than the votes of those against Brexit were nullified by those who voted for: it's in the nature of a vote that someone will lose (not be nullified).
I didn't vote for President Trump, but I am glad that we are a federal republic with an Electoral College, not a direct democracy or anything like it. I wish we had more federalism, not less, to include state legislatures appointing senators and electors, and the elimination of the popular vote for president altogether.
Um, that depends on what you mean by "roughly proportional":
+ Each state, no matter how low the population, gets a minimum of three votes in the Electoral College (one per House member and senator).
+ House representation increases by population, but Senate representation is capped at two, no matter how large the population.
+ As a result: "Each vote cast in Wyoming is worth 3.6 as much as the same vote cast in California. How can that be, you might ask? It’s easy to see, when you do the math. Although Wyoming had a population in the last census of only 563,767, it gets 3 votes in the Electoral College based on its two Senators and one Congressman. California has 55 electoral votes. That sounds like a lot more, but it isn’t when you consider the size of the state. The population of California in the last census was 37,254,503, and that means that the electoral votes per capita in California are a lot less. To put it another way, the three electors in Wyoming represent an average of 187,923 residents each. The 55 electors in California represent an average of 677,355 each, and that’s a disparity of 3.6 to 1." [0].
[0] E.g., http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-petrocelli/its-time-to...
It does reduce the weight of votes coming from inner cities, because it does not allocate votes proportionally all the time. The disparity occurs most obviously between the high populated states like New York, California, and Texas, compared with very low-population states like Montana or Wyoming. I live in New York, so my individual vote is worth less than someone living in Wyoming or Montana.
And the votes of those who are second-past-the-post are not "nullified"; they just didn't win. We have a different system (d'Hondt) and it has its drawbacks as well.
Sweeping generalizations are sweeping. And general. I don't believe all poor people, regardless of residence, lack motivation or are just looking for handouts. If pressed, I'd probably guess no more than 10% of the poor population would fairly deserve those insults. But, you could probably say only 10% of the global population might deserve those insults.
Just about everyone is bigoted against some group or other.
The fascinating thing is that this now has a meta-component, that is, the perceived bigotry of an out group is one of the rationales for the moral acceptability of bigotry against them.
Of course to most people who have such bigotry they would never call it such.
I do hope down voting this comment helps others deal with the cognitive dissonance.
I ask because this seems a very strange fashion in which to approach such a matter. On the one hand, you seem by your comment here very concerned with the possibility that one effect of these issues going unchecked is the election of a president with whom I presume you gravely disagree on almost every issue. On the other hand, your analysis of the issues themselves, and the value of efforts directed at mitigating or resolving them, seems entirely colored by the degree of emotional involvement you feel with the people who are most directly affected.
I don't understand this perspective at all, and I'm hoping you will take the time to explain what about it you find as sensible as your comment here strongly suggests you do.
http://idiosyncraticwhisk.blogspot.com/2015/11/housing-serie...
https://medium.com/@laurafooteclark/how-do-we-avoid-another-...
I will point out that there is one big blind spot I'm seeing in stuff like this. I suspect that you're conflating middle class white voters in conservative cities with poor rural white people and lumping them all together as "white rural voters". You shouldn't assume that they're a bloc, even in California lots of people are conservative and vice versa.
Every state has lots of open minded people who just want to find joy in their lives like everyone else. I grew up in Indiana, and if we want to go full anecdote, one example is my Boy Scout leader saying he'd stand by me against the national organization's anti-gay policies if push came to shove. Or NOBCChE letting me in because there was no other way to do the science fair at my high school. They didn't even tell me what NOBCChE stood for, and somehow I literally never noticed that I was the only person there who wasn't black. There are good people everywhere. Everywhere.
I have very little resentment for poor white people. I am very resentful of well off people voting for their own power, comfort, religious authority, and low taxes over the well being and safety of millions of people.
The data is enlightening, and I'll refrain from editorializing it: http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls
So yeah, I'm very sympathetic to anyone who is having a hard time. Especially those who see no way out. But that doesn't mean I'm okay with things that hurt me and my friends -- especially when that pain inflicted does nothing to actually alleviate anyone else's problems.
Kicking out immigrants or forcing gays into the closet or preventing transgender people from using the bathroom or preventing minorities from voting or making Jews fear for their lives won't help the opioid crisis or provide financial security. Treating these things like they are in any way intrinsically related is a huge problem in framing that results in poor tactics.
Access to lots of other services is better too... In the core of the large city I live in, there are so many emergency rooms/clinics that it would be difficult to be outside of walking distance of emergency care. That's much harder to do (and a poor allocation of resources) in rural Oklahoma, but it means my access to medical care is dramatically better.
Private medical aids are big business. It gets more expensive by the year and the benefits seem to be less and less. Its a grudge purchase. How much money is in medical aid in SA, take a look at this story. The CEO of the biggest medical aid made enough to [buy a top notch property](https://therealdeal.com/2014/01/06/south-african-insurance-m...) in New York. Bear in mind exchange rate is 1US$ = 13ZAR
For example while Appalachians have higher income on average (PPP) than a typical Bangladeshi, Appalachian life expectancy is lower. So maybe the marginal increase in income is more impactful in a place like Bangladesh -where people are less able to commit self-harm (even unintended like poor diets). Maybe people in Bangladesh, not having much in the way of comfort do more with marginal incomes. Maybe we can learn from these social forces to take advantage of our higher income and provide better living for people who while not at extreme poverty levels do worse then people living in extreme poverty.
How about an illegal heroin problem?
If you want to talk about the impact of opiates on Bangladeshi poverty today, you should go back much further in history.
Bengal opium, being much higher quality than the product found in China and Afghanistan, was the major impetus behind the British annexing the territory back in 1757. They used this monopoly to extract exorbitant taxes from Bengal, causing widespread man-made famines which killed tens of millions of people. They then used this tax money and the opium to flood the Chinese market with cheap, high-quality opium, against the Chinese rulers' will, in an attempt to undermine the Chinese government as well by creating a widespread opiate epidemic. China did not come under explicit colonial rule the way Bengal did, but it came very close.
Over this time period, Bengal went from being the richest region in the second-richest empire/region in the world (next to China) to one of the poorest, which it still is today, despite its rapid growth in recent years.
This strategy isn't over, by the way. The opiate market was (and still is) a part of the US military strategy in Afghanistan - balancing the desire to "crack down" on heroin production and smuggling against the desire to provide Afghani civilians with an agricultural economy that doesn't rely on Taliban support.
Bangladesh doesn't have a synthetic opiate problem, simply because people there are generally too poor to purchase synthetic opiates in the first place. Raw opium is still used in these areas due to its widespread availability, but it's much less addictive than the synthetic opiates, because pharmaceutical synthetics are obviously designed to be highly concentrated and potent.
As for the raw numbers, 0.3% of Bangladeshis consume opiates at least once per year, compared to 0.57% in the US, 0.8% in Italy, 2.65% in Afghanistan (the highest) and 0.004% in Singapore (the lowest).
I feel that's the key here. That oxycontin was over prescribed for about a decade. We are talking people getting in a car wreck and waking up in a hospital addicted to opiates.
I'm assuming we are in agreement that the pharmaceutical opiates are way more addictive than their illegal analogs. Snorting a pill is way less work than shooting up or "chasing the dragon" but once you're addicted and your brain tells you need dope to live, you'll do whatever you need to do to live.
>As for the raw numbers, 0.3% of Bangladeshis consume opiates at least once per year, compared to 0.57% in the US.
I wonder what the opiate use rate is amongst the Appalachian population. A few days ago there was a map posted of heroin overdoses in the US and West Virginia was the hottest hot spot. Anecdotes of OD's and pill heads in WVA abound. When I showed the map to one of my friends, he told me has had 12(!) people that he went to high school with die of pills and/or heroin.
I can't help but feel that the pharmaceutical companies and their executives are complicit in the current US opiate epedemic.
Thanks Obama(care)!
Actually, that's... a complicated question.
Pharmaceutical opiates are definitely more addictive than raw opium (that's like asking if eating white sugar is sweeter than cane sugar). But once you're comparing heroin available on the street to prescribed opiates, there are enough variables (variable quality of product, means of ingestion, the different situations under which a person chooses one over the other, etc.) that there isn't a straightforward answer.
We have to acknowledge the biological component of addiction, that some people are predisposed to certain addictions. There is a physical, chemical component that comes into play.
I, for example, smoked my first cigarette at 12 y/o. I continued to smoke cigarettes socially for the better part of the next decade, often buying my own packs of smokes. I never understood the "need" to smoke that many of my fellows expressed. I enjoyed the nicotine high, but never once felt it necessary to smoke tobacco to live a "normal" life. I stopped smoking one day after college and never felt the urge to smoke again. Even after long-term repeated exposure to nicotine I never developed a physical dependancy.
The "William Shatner seat" article posted yesterday sent me down a rabbit hole of Shatner talk shows (in "Aftermath" he interviews Bernie Goetz and it is amazing) ending on his "Raw Nerve" interview with Rush Limbaugh where Rush goes into great detail regarding his own painkiller habit. Contrasting how he speaks about opiates about how his body told him he needed pills like he needs food or water to my own personal experiences with opiates and nicotine only reinforces this belief that some people just have the right brain chemistry to get addicted.
My next thought is that the chemistry of the brain changes over time, under stress or when exposed to other chemicals. Ergo, at some point, people may be more prone to particular addictions than at other times.
http://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/crime/2016/12/19/stud...
https://news.vice.com/article/yaba-the-madness-drug-is-findi...
the history of 'Bengal Opium', especially its production & distribution is indeed a fascinating one. The historical fiction by Amitav Ghosh in his "Ibis Trilogy" is very illuminating:
The opioid epidemic is seriously bad here in the US and its negative effects are definitely magnified by the Appalachian malaise that existed before oxycontin.
I mean, they have recently run out of morgue space in South Eastern Ohio (also Appalachean).
I'm curious on the differing levels of use/abuse. My gut tells me that Bangladesh opiate consumption OD rates are lower than Appalachian.
7 out 10 times you are better of in Mississippi delta.
The other 3 times are both cultural and relative wealth.
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2015/medical_tourism.html
With other friends' mother doctors would keep ordering injections, each worth 20,000 Rs ($300) confident in the fact US based son can surely afford it. In the end he ended up spending about $35-40K for about 2 weeks of treatment which ended with mother's death.
Medical council is in cahoots with doctors and hospitals. If anyone has grievance they can spend years in courts before they see any justice about medical malpractice.
Also, many times, you just walk up to a pharmacy and ask the pharmacist for a medicine instead of talking to the doctor. Saves money and time
The mayor claps his hands, makes a press release about how great it is that we've finally cleaned up this den of filth/violence/drug abuse, while the homeless get to sleep under bridges for a few months.
Rent is just theft based on the monopolization of land. Forcing the poor to pay to live in government approved ghettos is more extortion of their limited resources by those who monopolize the commons.
Sometime ago on HN, there was the story of the Canadian gentleman who built his house. His crime was that he didn't use wood stamped by inspectors. It was found that he used wood far superior to what was required.
Back home, people make their own bricks. South Africa is more advanced than other African countries. The poor here do not make their own bricks. There too many laws and the laws are enforced.