Poverty and Hunger

[nietzschefan]

 

[S.A.M.]

Which of the Mills Brothers are you referring to. I am taking my source from Prof. Freddy Mills.


India witnessed interminable excruciating bloodshed, mass killings and civil war at the eve of independence, which overshadowed the festivity and euphoria of independence. Many Indians view the days of the Raj with reverence. Indian society Has divided into numerous classes, castes and religions and without British help it wouldn't have the essential infrastructure to have survived. Everything from the Judicial System to Railways was brought to India by the British Raj.

Thank the lord for liberators.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

the rich need the poor, the economy would not function without poor people.

You're the second person who says this, unless it was you the first time. Your assertion is extraordinary because it contradicts some of the most uncontroversial principles of modern economics. The scientific method is to be respected at all times on SciForums unless you're in one of the Halls of Woo-woo like Pseudoscience or Religion. The scientific method requires extraordinary assertions to be accompanied by extraordinary substantiation, or no one is obligated to take them seriously. Please provide your extraordinary substantiation immediately, or what you're doing starts to look a lot like trolling.

First, you can't simply take a number like $17,000 and suggest that these people are so much better off than people in other countries because they have so much less. You must take into account the cost of food, shelter, transportation and many other things that make life in this unique culture possible. Second, there are MANY people who make WELL below the poverty wage. Do you think there are not homeless people (who are not mentally ill)? Do you think children in this country don't go hungry on a daily basis? Do you think people don't de due to lack of medical care? Do you think there aren't people living in shacks and shanties? Do you think that there aren't people who simply can't afford to eat? We do not have any poor? You need to get out of your houses more and open your eyes to the reality that some people face every day.

My wife got out of our house every day for about twenty years and went to her job as a social worker. She is the person who had to deal with these people every single day. Although it was a heartbreaking job, there were not very many of them, not enough to be called a crisis. Many of them were incredibly sick people from totally dysfunctional countries like Mexico, where despite having worked for many years they would have been allowed to die.

And children need to produce the product for pennies halfway around the world.

Have you read the interviews with those children's parents? They are doubling the family income. They simply regard it as an unavoidable step in their countries' transition out of destitution. I'd like to find another solution but in the meantime you can't judge other people by your own standards. There's no question that no one would buy those products if they were priced out for workers who are paid the U.S. minimum wage. The work would simply be automated.

Yes, Capitalism most certainly requires the poor - regardless of what you think of Communism and China. Who cleans the toilets? Who climbs down the mineshafts? Who busses the tables? Who does all the shit jobs if you have no poor?

Well finally somebody remembers the scientific method and provides substantiation for his extraordinary assertion. An honorable man among the trolls. When we can't find people to do the shit jobs we'll do two things. First we'll increase the wage. It's amazing how much less degrading a job looks when it pays $50K. Plumbing is a crummy job but there's no shortage of plumbers now that they charge as much as lawyers, including being able to bill for their travel time. Second, we'll automate it, just like we did with those demeaning factory jobs. There used to be people sweeping the streets with brooms, remember? Now they have one guy in a truck doing the jobs of fifty sweepers. Mining will certainly be done by robots. My wife has a little robot called a Roomba that skitters around the floors vacuuming up the dirt. I'm sure the people who invented the Roomba plan to become as rich as Bill Gates by programming one to clean toilets.

one_raven is right. Food insecurity is a growing and serious problem in the US. Numbers...

I don't know where they find all these people. Certainly not in California on my wife's watch. Did they all come over in boats after she left her government job? Now that I'm closer to the former Confederacy than I ever wanted to be, judging from the tales people tell who come up from there, I wonder if they're not all in places like Alabama. If Lincoln had had less hubris and better judgment, those places wouldn't even be part of America, dragging down our statistics.

So I guess it is true after all, Americans think poor people deserve their poverty due to laziness and stupidity.

Don't judge all of us by the Religious Redneck Retards. We Americans differ from one another as much as any people. The vast majority of us are at least grudgingly compassionate. Many of us think that government charity does not work well and it would be better left to private organizations like the Salvation Army. Their employees are free to use their judgment and intuition to decide whether an applicant for charity is lazy or downright dishonest. The government employees are required to follow their rules slavishly, so naturally people who are very good at following rules collect charity even if they don't deserve it. Also, government programs tend to entrench poverty because the people who collect charity don't have to face the people who are contributing the money and look them in the eye every week. Some of them just never bothered to learn how to use an alarm clock to get up on time. Nonetheless none of us seriously wants to let poor people starve or die of illness. You don't even have to be compassionate to take that viewpoint, it's simply a matter of public health and safety.

First and foremost one must look at how the 'civilizations'/cities developed...and whether the industrial revolution was possible among an essentially nomadic/tribal peoples.

Of course not. Read my dozens of posts on the history of civilization. Agriculture had to be invented before people could stay in one place and build complex artifacts like furniture, looms and potter's wheels. Much less the mines and smelters that made metallurgy possible. Without bronze and ultimately steel technology, industry was inconceivable.

The commonly held view in prosperous nation such as the USA and West Europe is that their failure to develop is the fault of themselves and themselves alone.

And this is of course balderdash. Both Africa and the Americas were held back by their north-south continental orientation. Agriculture does not transfer across lines of latitude very readily, so both regions were slow to develop farming and animal husbandry, which made possible the permanent villages that would grow into cities. In addition, Africa was deliberately held back by the civilizations that sprang up on its periphery: Egypt and the various offshoots of Mesopotamia including Phoenicia, Greco-Roman Europe, the Arabs and the Ottomans. Africa was a great source of trinkets, natural resources and slave labor which no one wanted to see develop its own civilization and declare autonomy.

Africa never developed anything we would recognise as agriculture. this did not matter when populations were kept small by disease and endemic warfare.

See my previous remarks. Some tribes actually did develop animal husbandry, which is half of agriculture and is possible for a nomadic society.

Colonisation brought peace, medicine and hygiene. And populations grew.

In our defense, we didn't understand that we could give Stone Age people vaccines and antibiotics but they would not immediately be able to overturn thousands of years of the custom of having large numbers of children so some of them would survive.

With decolonisation came gross maladministration, theft, corruption and hunger.

That can't all be blamed on the indigenous people who were thrust into a modern world in just a few generations that took the rest of us ten thousand years to slowly adapt to. For their part, the colonial administrators ignored--or were ignorant of--the tribal divisions among Stone Age people. They drew arbitrary lines on a map, splitting tribes into pieces and recombining them with fragments of other tribes who had nothing in common but suspicion and hatred. To call Nigeria, Rhodesia or Tanganyika a "nation" is to display arrogant ignorance of the people one claims to govern.

In Northern Europe the people had to work hard just to survive and when times were good they carried on working hard (as it was habitual) and this helped them grow.

That's too facile and borders on racism. There were many profound differences between the world faced by the Northern Europeans and the Africans, and I've only touched on a couple of them.

Islam also had a civilization but did not make it into the 20th Century. Neither did China or India but that may be due to different causes/explanations... Japan is an example of a country that did.

The Middle East, China and India were all bedeviled by European colonialism. Japan was not. You're shooting holes in one of your own arguments.

 

[Michael]

Poverty and hunger seem to depend on the time and place.

Natural Disaster
Obviously during the Great famine there were too many people with too little resources due to the famine in that time and that place. So people were impoverished and went hungry and many died.

Poor Government
In China the Communist government starved what 30 million in the Great Leap Backwards? China was continuously receiving food aid up until just a few year back - correct? North Koreans are actually shrinking in statue due to malnutrition - up to 3 million have starved to death. Interestingly, the year China allowed collective farms to keep and sell their surplus food for profit was the very first year those farms produced a surplus. Prior to that they had always fell short. Of course History is littered with Aristocrats who controlled farming and taxed farmers to death. Very common.

So summary: Natural disaster and poor government.



So, with this in mind. We know Indonesians are poor and many malnourished. Why? A balanced answer would be great.



One example to ponder:

There was a shoe factory in Indonesia. The employees were paid OK but not much. More than the local wage but nothing compared with here in AU. People lived pretty crap - I'd say one could argue they were being exploited. Maybe. Probably by their local government and also they were making shoes for a Western company dirt cheap that get sold here for $250 a pair. A Union of workers that used to work for the company when it was located in AU went to Indonesia and campaigned for the workers there to have a Union and be paid better wages. The Indonesian workers signed on to this idea, once they could see the shoes were selling for $250 a pair while they get $2 a day! Eventually they went on strike. The company simply shut down and moved back to AU (which is what the Union secretly had hoped - supposedly). The Indonesians were totally screwed after that. No job and now doubly as poor. They were so pissed - it was all the Unions fault. At least before they made some money - better than the average person but still pretty crap. Now they had nothing.
I know many Americans out of work and screwed because GM has left MI. Everyone I know in MI either blames the government, blames GM, blames the Chinese, the Japanese, the GM executives, Bush, even us! (for not buying made in America cars at 50K a pop) - everyone is to blame but themselves. No No No it's someones fault they are out of work but not theirs - - but isn't it their fault?

No one makes someone work for a business. No one is a slave in todays day and age. People choose to work - don't they?


Any thoughts?

 

[Michael]

Well here's a problem: Russia to sell arms to IndonesiaThe Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is in Indonesia to sign a deal giving his host nation a state loan of $1bn (£495m) to buy Russian arms.

Their gong to buy two submarines with a hope of buying 8 more? Why?!?!? Indonesians are starving, many are poorly educated, end they waste what precious money they have on subs?!? Indonesians elect their government so they really have themselves to blame on this one. And this is just a high profile case, can you imagine the 10s of billions that are lost in ineffective government and corruption?

Michael

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

I know many Americans out of work and screwed because GM has left MI. Everyone I know in MI either blames the government, blames GM, blames the Chinese, the Japanese, the GM executives, Bush, even us! (for not buying made in America cars at 50K a pop) - everyone is to blame but themselves.

It's interesting that the people you know who are refugees from the auto industry don't place the blame where many other Americans do: labor unions. Unions have their place in an imperfect economy, but they are capable of becoming just as imperious, bloated, greedy and unresponsive as any other institution once they achieve power.

Blue-collar workers with no education and no ambition were "earning" middle class incomes (equivalent to $40-50K in today's dollars) for pushing a button. Those who did some actual manual labor, such as moving parts around or holding them still while they were welded, made even more.

It's bad enough that our country was paying $100K or more in public funds to give these people a 12-year education of which they only used the first five years (and often spent the last seven goofing off), but auto buyers were paying them $40-50K each year to do jobs that could be--and ultimately were--done better by automation.

The "American way" is to use the bounty we give you to make a better life for your children. That's what the immigrants do: they hold two jobs and use the money to send their kids to college. Native-born American blue-collar workers too often spent the money on consumer goods, and raised their children to believe that they could coast through life with a high-paying factory job, just like mom and dad.

I know that's a stereotype, I've met computer programmers whose parents were factory workers. But the stereotypical attitude was far too common, and it was made possible by the labor unions.

 

[Grantywanty]

Blue-collar workers with no education and no ambition were "earning" middle class incomes (equivalent to $40-50K in today's dollars) for pushing a button. Those who did some actual manual labor, such as moving parts around or holding them still while they were welded, made even more.

I assume that you find it offensive that there are people who make a lot of money a couple of hours a day trading stocks. Selling short for example, or messing with wild derivatives. And getting paid well over middle class wages. Or that there are people who pay other people to do this while they are playing golf. Amazingly many of these latter managed to work very little without union representation.

 

[madanthonywayne]

I know that's a stereotype, I've met computer programmers whose parents were factory workers. But the stereotypical attitude was far too common, and it was made possible by the labor unions.

My grandfather, my dad, my uncle; they all worked for US Steel. My dad took a promotion to management, and that really pissed off my grandfather since it meant my dad had to quit the union.

My father hated the steel mill and told me my entire life to get an education so I wouldn't be dependent on some factory job that could be gone at a moments notice.

Anyway, I took his advice. I agree with you about unions. There's a factory in a small town near where I live that makes brake pads. These guys were making like $28 an hour. The company said it had to cut costs or close down the plant and offered them a new contract where they'd be making $23 an hour.

The idiot union turned it down! The plant is now closing down. It's gone from employing 600 men to maybe 100 and who knows how long those jobs will last. These guys are now going to be lucky to make $10 an hour someplace else.

The same thing happened to a foundry in the same town. The union voted down a very good offer and the foundry closed. Much of the equipment was brand new, so some foriegn company bought up the equipment and reopened the foundry. This time with no union. Also, they only hired back less than half the guys that had been working there at lower pay. Everyone had to re-interview and they mostly hired the young, healthy guys; not the old timers. So ironically, the guys who voted down the contract (the old timer UNION! guys) ended up being the ones hurt the most.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

I assume that you find it offensive that there are people who make a lot of money a couple of hours a day trading stocks. Selling short for example, or messing with wild derivatives. And getting paid well over middle class wages. Or that there are people who pay other people to do this while they are playing golf. Amazingly many of these latter managed to work very little without union representation.

It isn't just the number of hours spent working, but the years of preparation and the money spent to acquire the skills. The old joke about a doctor, plumber, or attorney charging $20 for the time it takes to solve a problem, and $480 for having spent a lifetime and going into debt in order to acquire the knowledge of how to fix it.

People who make a living by trading equities are taking huge risks and being paid for it. It's a gamble that they lose sometimes. People who make a living on commission by trading equities for other people don't really make much of a living; those are not glamorous jobs. People who own their own firms and pay others to do the work generally achieved that position by investing and taking risks, and usually also by spending the time and money to get a university education. Even if it was their parents' money.

I do agree that unionized blue collar workers are not the only overpaid Americans. Corporate America is going through a scavenging cycle now, with companies buying up companies that are dying. The whole concept of the "holding company" is the dark side of capitalism. Some kid with the ink still wet on his MBA effectively owns a tiny percent of a company's stock, but his holding company controls it, and he makes decisions that affect the lives of hundreds or thousands of employees and thousands or millions of consumers, without even understanding what the subordinate company does.

I think the prominence of holding companies and corporate scavenging is a portent of a structural change in the First World economy with the transition from the Industrial Era to the post-industrial era or information age. I think the huge concentrations of capital that were necessary to build and run the metal- and petroleum-intensive corporations of the Industrial Era will no longer be quite as necessary now that information is becoming the predominant resource and information can be reproduced without limit, distributed for very low cost, and produced by modest-sized enterprises. I suspect your great-grandchildren will grow up in a world in which capitalism has been redefined and the abuses and excesses of today will have faded away as new ones slowly arise to take their place.

 

[Pandaemoni]

Some kid with the ink still wet on his MBA effectively owns a tiny percent of a company's stock, but his holding company controls it, and he makes decisions that affect the lives of hundreds or thousands of employees and thousands or millions of consumers, without even understanding what the subordinate company does.

I'm not sure what you mean bu "his holding company controls it" if he only owns a tiny percent. A holding company is just a corporation that owns no assets (and engages in no business) other than the ownership and management of stock of other corporations. It can own a fraction of the shares of the other company, or most or all of those shares (in which latter case the holding company is the "parent" of the "subsidiary" company).

The main reason to use a holding company is for organizational convenience or as a convenient investment vehicle (as with Berkshire Hathaway). They've been around for a long time. I see nothing sinister in them.

I do see problems with unions, but the problems I see are "theory of the firm" type problems that also face corporations and other business organizations. "Firms" are a mechanism to allow various investors to come together and allow for a collective management that represents their interests. That reduces transaction costs and is overall a good thing, but as with any other collectivist behavior the management's incentives and decisions are not going to reflect the economically efficient "marginalist" positions you'd expect the disparate owners to adopt individually. (In particular, it grants the owners the benefit of acting as a collective bargaining unit against their employees that the owners (obviously) would not have had without the firm. That will have different value in different labor markets, but there is usually some benefit to collective negotiation when a group has roughly the same goals. In essence, labor unions are just playing "catch-up;" they certainly weren't the first to try collective bargaining, it had been used against labor for centuries.)

I do agree that a leading cause of abject poverty is corruption. There are other market inefficiencies at work as well, though, the most notable being that if you live in a corrupt society (or think you do) it's relatively hard to vote with your feet and find a better one (as most nations reject such economic refugees) and can be costly (or even deadly) to fix the one with which you are stuck. The idea of "throwing the bums out" presents daunting collective action problems, from an economic perspective, and there's no guaranty that the next set of bums will be any better.

 

[Michael]

I was hoping this thread would attract more attention
And it'd be good to see more solutions proffered too. For Indonesia for example

 

[Crunchy Cat]

What do YOU think are the causes of poverty and hunger in a world as replete and as small as ours is today?

Overpopulation and inefficient use of resources.