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There are two distinct experiences being discussed here: the experience of living in absolute poverty; and the experience of being down-and-out in a city you ca
by derefr 5y ago
There are two distinct experiences being discussed here: the experience of living in absolute poverty; and the experience of being down-and-out in a city you can't afford the cost-of-living of (i.e. "relative" poverty — the kind you could in theory get away from by "moving somewhere cheaper", but where for various reasons people don't tend to do that.)
Both the poor person in Toronto and the poor person in Delhi are in relative poverty, and have the lived experiences of relative poverty in common.
And also, the lived experiences of relative poverty are usually what someone means when they talk about "being poor." If you live in Dubai and make $50k/yr, but that doesn't even get you a crappy apartment two hours away from work, so you have to sleep in your car; and all your money is going to paying for groceries in a city that has to import all its food, and for car insurance that costs more than your car, so you don't have any savings — then you're poor, by most people's definition!
But of course, only the homeless person in Delhi experiences absolute poverty. They have two problems: relative poverty, and absolute poverty.
But the homeless person in Delhi will still commisserate with the homeless person in Toronto over the lived experiences and troubles that come from relative poverty — a problem they both share — even if the homeless person in Toronto doesn't know anything about what living with absolute poverty is like. They both still get their meagre possessions stolen if they stop watching them for a few minutes. They both sleep rough and have to actively think about how to not die when there's a heat wave or a cold spell. They both probably have a fungal infection somewhere on their bodies from their clothes being damp all the dang time. Etc.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sombremesa 5y ago> But the homeless person in Delhi will still commisserate with the homeless person in Toronto Perhaps, but it's worth pointing out that these experiences are qualitatively different. In India, being poor (especially if you're a certain caste) is tantamount to being non-human. You can be jailed, raped, mistreated, killed without consequence. Even the middle class is afforded little human dignity, the underclass have no real hope. The homeless in Toronto can still get some government services without bribery. On top of that, there's the whole matter of caste which won't go away even if you win the lottery. Someone else here is saying that dating poor in Switzerland is the same as in Delhi...that comes across as unbelievably tone deaf. Perhaps they missed the part in TFA where this couple has to date far away from the home. You can get beaten up or killed for being seen with the "wrong person" (in this case same gotra), and it does happen - quite often. So it's not as simple as absolute and relative poverty in my opinion (though that is a good thought and is definitely part of it). Risking another bad analogy, I would perhaps compare it to being the lowest class of worker in a Walmart versus being at the bottom of the org chart in Netflix. You can both commiserate on how bad your managers are, but your lived experiences are not remotely the same.
- beiller 5y agoI do agree with the broader point that they are not comparable, but one interesting caveat with Toronto is that come winter time, you're dead due to extreme cold and being homeless.
- RHSeeger 5y ago> You can both commiserate on how bad your managers are And that's all the person you were replying to was saying. You can have things in common to talk about, and also have things that are so different you can't even comprehend them.
- derefr 5y agoI feel like that's conflating yet a third kind of poverty: having no societal respectability. Having no social "credit." No https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Whuffie https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Whuffie . Being in poverty but of a high caste in India, is pretty-standard "absolute poverty." Meanwhile, being well-off but of a low caste in India, is more like being a recently-freed black slave in the ante-bellum southern US. That experience is really nothing like absolute or relative poverty. It's its own kind of horrible. (It's an orthogonal poverty, one could say.) It does lead to a vicious cycle that connects it to absolute/relative poverty, though, since having no societal respectability means people aren't willing to offer you any opportunities to better your situation, because they think badly of you and expect you to squander them. But I would say it is nevertheless best to think of a low-caste homeless person in Delhi as having three distinct problems: relative poverty, absolute poverty, and poverty of societal-respectability. I would note that, while a regular homeless person in Toronto might not know anything about the sheer inhumanity of being of a low caste in India, a drug-addicted homeless person working as a prostitute to feed their addiction would actually understand it somewhat. In both cases, for example, if someone in these groups gets murdered or otherwise wronged, the police don't even bother to investigate — so they have no access to justice. The low-caste homeless in Delhi and the crack-addicted streetwalker in Toronto would see the same looks on people's faces, and understand them to mean the same thing.
- sombremesa 5y ago