I think subconsciously many people think of slums as godless drug war zones with no sanitation, and that any soul dumb enough to ventures into one will never co

I think subconsciously many people think of slums as godless drug war zones with no sanitation, and that any soul dumb enough to ventures into one will never come back out alive. This census shows with some actual data that reality is a lot closer to what Bill Gates and poverty scholars have been saying about the poor: that they've been slowly crawling up in the quality of life scale, despite all the hardships. I'm not actually all that interested in the exact cash flow figures. What I think is interesting is people's perceptions of some of the mechanisms in play. For example, take "protection tax". If you think about it, governments and the police operate under a very similar principle (you pay for police services through taxes and if you don't pay, you are punished, perhaps even via force if you resist). Also if you think about it, it's not in a drug gang's interest to extort businesses out of business, since then they would have nowhere to get food or clothes for their kids (yes drug gangs have kids). It's interesting how even in places where one would think anarchy would rule, systems still form that are similar to "normal" civilized systems, and it's interesting that there are local economies within slums and bias from outsiders similar to sentiment from some xenophones in US or Europe. It's almost like it's human nature that certain things develop the way they do.