The perpetuation of bonded labor in Pakistan | Hacker News Reader

The perpetuation of bonded labor in Pakistan

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106 pointsDanBC59 comments

Pakistan is the closest thing today to a medieval feudal society. Near no industry, and the upper class is mostly represented by landlords.

Bonded kiln labourers are one thing, but there are also a lot of bonded land labourers.

Were there any opportunity to make money with labour, things would've changed. See, now if those people were to run away, even then they would have little opportunities to make money elsewhere.

Country is knee deep in trade and financial sanctions around the world thanks to India (try sending a wire there from a Western nation, and you will be up for an amazing adventure.) That's not the only impediment to doing exports.

You have to add to this that the elites there a very conscious that if the industrialisation will "hit the fan" it will hit the fan on them. Some are working quite actively to lobby against industrialisation, and trying to sabotage it with passive-aggressive style resistance.

Interesting. This is almost exactly out of Daron Acemoglu's paper "Why is there no political Coase theorem?" His story is that inefficient policies persist because elites fear losing power of they implement efficient ones. Got any illustrative anecdotes?

As a Pak- American, I was pretty upset when Yousuf Raza Gilani said at a press conference (when he was PM) if people didn’t like Pakistan what was stopping them from leaving. He clearly wasn’t thinking of these guys. I think that movie Zinda Bhaag was made in response.

And they have nuclear bombs

That’s a little overblown- they’re kept disassembled and have PALs that the Americans know the code to

Wikipedia, which of course is not infallible, says that Pakistan rejected US offers to share PAL technology but is believed to have developed their own equivalent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...

This is a painful read, from the comfort of an armchair. The worst is that I even have no idea how an individual can help in such situations.

I just realised we just spent more on 5 days for a holiday rental over Christmas than this family received for selling 2 kidneys to try and escape their debt. It’s crushing to read stories like these. Surely there must be some sort of structural reform possible to “the way the world works” to prevent this absurd imbalance.

>Surely there must be some sort of structural reform possible to “the way the world works” to prevent this absurd imbalance.

Yes, it's called redistributing wealth from those that have it, to those that don't. That means people that have large homes, yards, SUVs, vacations requiring flights, give them up, and pour their resources into lifting up those that don't have it. And not just money, but time and effort to educate the uneducated and impoverished, and blood to fight the oppressors.

It's not a realistic goal, hence it's "the way the world works". It does help one appreciate how lucky one is to be born in the right place at the right time.

The primary problem with this suggestion is that it ignores the actual problem. The barriers to the common man's prosperity in Pakistan are erected by the political elites in Pakistan. A world where you can meaningfully talk about employing redistribution is a world where you have already removed those elites and empowered the population against them: a world in which we're having a rather different argument.

Removing those elites is what I meant when I wrote "blood to fight the oppressors", aka war.

If we are advocating revolution, the next thing is for Pakistan to actually meaningfully industrialize, and gain sufficient wealth — redistributing what already exists only goes a short way. In the ideal case this involves the world economy, and probably looks like outside investment building factories, and the factories paying Pakistani people mediocre money while the new government builds institutions suitable for a modern economy — courts that respect the rule of law, laws that provide a balance between the needs of capital suppliers and labor, laws that promote meaningful competition instead of entrenching well-connected political elites, and a modern education system.

The likelier alternative is they eschew participation in the world economy, building things from scratch themselves, doing it badly, without a rule of law, with a bad education system, with heavy state involvement that provides power to well-connected political elites, and a populist attitude which ignores the needs of capital, promoting empty slogans about economic justice instead of committing to the hard work and sacrifice associated with actually achieving it. The net result will be depressed capital formation, with an economy tilted towards state-run sectors and large companies which are friendly with the new regime. Since capital is important for productivity, the economy will continue to stagnate, though presumably it will see some improvement (it'd be hard not to at this point).

"Redistributing wealth" is not really an appropriate answer for what has been described, as any newly received resources would just be transferred away under the same everdebt setup. What's needed is for such debts are made unenforceable through societal reform - debts not being inherited, bankruptcy protection, increased ability to travel, technological advancements, etc.

It's an incredible financial challenge, to say the least.

In 1960 Pakistan had 25% the population of the US at about 2.7% the GDP per capita of the US. Today Pakistan has 60% of the population of the US at about 2.4% the GDP per capita of the US. The vast majority of developing countries have gained considerable ground on the US over that time on a per capita output basis, Pakistan has lost ground.

To bring Pakistan up to the output level per capita of China or Russia (roughly near the world average; plausibly giving them the necessary room to make considerable employment, social welfare and infrastructure improvements) - Pakistan needs to add about $1.8 trillion per year to its economic output, an economy nearly the size of Italy or Brazil. To reach the level of Croatia, their output has to climb by $2.6 trillion per year, an economy the size of France.

I don't see how the world can change anything structurally outside of Pakistan, in terms of how the world works, that will dent that enormous scale of a financial problem. Pakistan has to change dramatically internally. China and many other countries have managed that sort of prominent internal change over time, hopefully Pakistan can as well.

While the poverty of Pakistan is indeed a problem, I would argue that it is not the cause of this situation. This situation is human exploitation backed by the government. The change needed here requires political, not just economic changes. I would suggest that this form of servitude is part of the cause of Pakistan's limited economic growth. Minimum wage and the ability to declare bankruptcy would go a long way to disrupting this particular status quo.

There was a man surnamed Bhutto. He tried. The thing was really not about Bhutto being a socialist or anybody, but because he touched major landlors.

Take a look at astronomical land prices in the country. Then think how land prices got so high in the country so poor.

Now look who are the biggest land owners.

Your comment would be more interesting and constructive if you you provided information (ideally with references) rather than asking rhetorical questions.

As it is, I don't really know what point you are trying to make.

Will gladly provide it you. Pakistan is largely an agrarian feudal society, even with some new nouveau riche coming industrialist families.

Coincidentally many military families do make Pakistani "old money" class. Generals make for huge portion of land owners (they are even few kanals of prime rib agricultural lands in their official retirement package.) The second biggest real estate company in the country also belong the the army.

Any reform that threatens land value get instantaneously attacked by them, politicians get killed. Even when laws pass the parliament, local authorities under control of landlord class will do everything they can to sabotage their implementation though active and passive resistance.

As I recall, the part of Punjab tenancy act from the Raj that gave tenant first right of refusal upon sale of the land was overturned by Zia’s Federal Sharia bench in 1980s

We should get Biblical. No half measures. Periodically forgive all debts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)

I'm curious, but ignorant, of the Quran's notion of riba, the prohibition on interest payments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riba

More close to home, I'd like more discussion about our own debt-based economy. The emphasis on rent seeking. The "Gig Economy", where people pay for the opportunity to work, aka pay for play, franchising. All these weird MLM schemes.

Update: I forgot to mention Freedom Markets™, my pejorative for the cult of laissez faire, might makes right, I've-got-mine-screw-you, and other misanthropic notions.

>Periodically forgive all debts.

This will be priced into debts, see short term lending rates. Those who can't make money by lending won't lend, meaning the borrowers will have to either not get the money or turn to those who don't play by the legal system.

>I'm curious, but ignorant, of the Quran's notion of riba, the prohibition on interest payments.

The money from interest is instead added to the price. It has some differences (less ability to save money by paying off early), but overall the lenders still make their money.

>I'd like more discussion about our own debt-based economy.

For starters, we can look to stop the sin tax on labor. Granted, most people don't call it a sin tax, but the difference between a sin tax and a tax appears to be marketing.

> borrowers will have to either not get the money

If credit shrinks, asset prices decrease so borrowers would need less money anyway. In the end it's all about who owns the capital.

Mesopotamian civilizations had to forgive debts periodically because the economy was heavily leveraged: farmers had to rent the land. A bad harvest could mean they'd have to sell their children to slavery. They were also surrounded by nomadic tribes. Social unrest would spiral out of control pretty quickly as broke people would join the nomads and turn to pillage.

That's a lesson every Abrahamic religion learned.

Call it bankruptcy if that helps.

Otherwise, I agree that lenders should bear more (most?) of the burdens for risky lending.

You clearly have an ideological opposition to capitalism, and that taint your views.

The Bible or the Quran can't protect you for the human natural desire and need to make money.

You should google about islamic banks to know what happens when interest is banned. Hint: the difference is just cosmetic.

So if christians implemented a jubilee, I have no doubt it would be baked into some credit score and automatically increase all cost for people who took advantage of it - that or something else essentially similar.

The best thing that can happen to countries like Pakistan? Capitalism. Free market.

People are not stupid. They look at the neighboring countries who have more economically liberal regimes, see what they get, and vote with their feet.

Compared to socialist India until 1991 they were capitalist and free market

Are you sure that Pakistan's system of bonded service is capitalism? Perhaps we have different definitions. I checked wiki, dictionary.com and there's no mention of slavery, usury.

It's not capitalism, which is why I say it's the best thing that can happen in the future.

India has been slowly moving away from the license raj, and turning more capitalist little by little.

Okay. I think I better understand what you're saying.

Reading the wikipedia entry on capitalism was a nice refresher. I am not an economist, so interpret as you wish: These farmers are not wage laborers. So capitalism doesn't apply. (Doubly so for sharecroppers, bonded labor, slaves. Obviously.)

My suggestion is in specific response to the observation that a financial fix would be impractical. I agree. So my proposal is to leverage Pakistan's Muslim cultural heritage. Jubilee's are part of the Abrahamic tradition, spanning Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So maybe it'd find more traction where capitalism has not.

I’m assuming these are West Pakistan stats in 1960?

Maybe focus on the doable rather than on grand structural reforms. Pakistan could be pressured to improve legal protections for labourers. There could be land redistribution or a redistributive welfare state. All of these have happened in other developing countries, without world revolution or armed struggle.

Bonded labour has been outlawed multiple times on paper.

There were some show trials of kiln owners.

Believe me or not, a lot of bonded labourers are so down on the bottom that they don't even know that they can sue their usurers in the court.

The last sentence of the post shows that he has lost all hope of ever coming out of debt.

"In a few years, when my son is old enough, I may have to sell one of his kidneys as well,"

This is called a poverty cycle. And the current Nobel Prize winners in Economics have talked a lot about this. The foundation of UBI is based on cases like these.

They typically do that in the context of countries that are already wealthy for those within that country. You would not be able to do UBI at the level of a country the size and state of Pakistan at present unless you got other countries to pay for it.

The other day I was thinking about the proposed UBI program in the states ($1000/month), and wondered what a difference it would make for the poorest people in the world if the same monthly budget was instead divided between all citizens of the world.

It ends up being about than $40 a month, but for people living under a dollar a day, that's a huge difference.

Unfortunately there is no financial structure in place yet to deliver UBI to every citizen of the world, but it's definitely something worth thinking about.

Enforcement is going to be pretty hard. It's the thing that Bill Gates talks about when talking about philanthropy.

If everyone in the world gets $30 - warlords in Africa, and landlords or local gangsters in other impoverished nations with weak law enforcement will easily be able to extract $25/person from their locality as 'protection money'.

Now though, if those thugs at the top end up spending that money on local businesses, they're slowly boosting their economy. But they're more likely to buy smuggled German cars, thus evading local import taxes and funneling that money back into the developed nations with zero gain for the local economy.

However, what I've stated is the worst case scenario. More likely than not, that $5 left with individuals is quite a lot in most countries and may end up boosting their economy albeit at a lower scale than what was imagined.

A lot of things need to change. Better transparent and accountable governance. Reliable and fair police/courts. Technology that can self sustain the population. (None of that patented seeds for farming).

Some level of sustainable land distribution (otherwise land lords suck all that UBI money anyway)

One could say SF is on average quite wealthy, but very broken. Even a UBI of $1000/month doesn’t do jack shit there until you solve the housing problem.

Basically people need to have good nutrition, have a roof over their head (feel secure), be autonomous and have some sort of self worth (mostly comes from doing some sort of work that creates value). All without destroying the planet (which we’re doing at an accelerated pace)

UBI doesn’t necessarily guarantee all those conditions are met.

GiveDirectly is experimenting with that kind of small-sum UBI in eastern Africa: https://www.givedirectly.org/

It would require a world government with teeth to be able to pull that off, Einstein was a famous proponent of this but even he could not make the case convincingly enough to get people to give it a try.

https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/should-we-have-a-world-gove...

I'm no economist, but injecting that much money that fast into an economy opens a whole new can of worms with inflation and currency devaluation right?

Yes, but the net value is increased. It’s because giving $20 to a homeless person has a different effect than giving $20 to Jeff Bezos. The homeless person goes and spends it immediately, whereas Jeff Bezos’ spending habits won’t meaningfully change because of that.

>unless you got other countries to pay for it.

Well it is Universal Basic Income, not National Basic Income. One of the fun discussions with UBI is seeing people discuss who should and shouldn't get it.

All UBI experiments that I'm aware of so far have been confined to a single country.

All the ones I recall are extremely limited on a number of fronts. They limited to a small group of people, for a limited time, and generally the funds are quite limited. I personally don't think these even qualify as UBI because some of the proposed positives for UBI do not exist when it has such limits. For example, if you are only getting UBI for 2 years, you have to plan out for the rest of your life after those 2 years and can't make the same choices as if you were being given UBI for life.

Fully agreed. UBI simply has not yet been tried on a scale and over a span of time that it would qualify as a real trial.

Of course other countries should pay for it.

There is a conflict of interest. Foreign aid won't work because you're effectively paying corrupt politicians to keep their country unstable so that they can collect more foreign aid.

Foreign aid doesn't have to be given to local politicians for them to distribute as they see fit. You can also pay trusted outsiders to do it instead. And the magnitude of repeat payments should probably depend on how much the previous installments helped instead of how bad the situation still is.

Some middle eastern countries, like Qatar, have what amounts to UBI (guaranteed jobs and free basics). It has resulted in what in the west is called the excess and decadence. Without relying on natural resource extraction, I’m not sure it’s sustainable.

You can't, and you don't have to. It's their problem and their responsibility. They have the right to do whatever they want within their sovereign territory, for better or for worse.

I feel drawn to this post. I find it difficult not to reply.

You are right. It is reasonable to try to do good within your immediate social circle.

You can still feel bad for situation that afflicts others AND could very well end up being part of culture in US.

My first post was strictly political. Now, about health: it is not good or desirable to feel bad about things you can do nothing about. Any therapist will tell you that.

I am arguing self-preservation. What you seem to think is completely detached from you, could very well end up on you rdoorstep.

Is that not worth contemplating and worth feeling bad about; if only for a little while?

Does this have a racial background like the lower castes in India?

As far as I am informed, Islam not only spread by sword in India but also because it overcame the caste system. I don't understand how people united in their rejection of castes are willing to maintain slavery.

Could it be that Pakistan has many former lower castes members and even after centuries of leaving the caste system behind them, they are unable to overcome their victimhood?

This part of Punjab had lower castes but also many clans that didn’t fit neatly into caste system. It’s not clear which is the case here. In India lower caste Muslims are still often endogamous. Christians in Pakistan more often tend to have a lower caste background.

That is not correct. Caste system never existed in India, at least not in the same or anti-humane form as in Islam - like Sunni, Shia, Ahmediyas etc. Caste system was an invention of the British & magnified to exponential proportions.

Shia and Ahmadiyya are treated badly, but they are not castes (not yet anyway). All British did was freeze what they saw in place.

The British thought that India suffered from the same casteism as Christianity (& Abrahamic religions) in other places, so they tried their best to retrofit Indian society into that model. But they could find no evidence of casteism, so they were forced to artificially make up many "castes" & grouped people based on occupation etc. The people who could not be fitted into any castes were called a tribes, which are now known as scheduled tribes & castes. Otherwise there should have been just 4 castes according to every tenet of Hinduism. Unfortunately, Indians & the GOI have formalized that artificiality & that is the genesis of the caste system. Caste system is nothing but an invention of the British. Caste itself is a Portuguese word, nothing that correlates to Indian / Hinduism.

Pray tell, what casteism does Abrahamic religions suffer from? Sectarianism?

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