95% of the biggest nation in the world (or maybe second biggest, no one really knows the exact pop of India and China) lives in far deeper poverty than poor americans. Many of them experience actual suffering - not enough food, no flush toilet, no power.
What, precisely, do you believe poor Americans are suffering from? The only concrete answer I usually hear is envy (I.e. "oh noes the inequality").
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...
> What, precisely, do you believe poor Americans are suffering from?
Well, just for starters, they're suffering from entirely treatable diseases and injuries because they don't have health insurance, or don't have non-shitty health insurance. Quite a few of of them are suffering from childhood malnutrition, leading to lifelong cognitive and developmental defects. On the lowest rung, they are suffering from homelessness and all the deprivation and desperation that comes with it.
You're trying to tell us that someone to trying to raise kids in a rotting, roach-infested apartment in a drug-haunted slum, with no chance at a decent education and no real hope of advancement, is really perfectly all right because at least they're not actually living in a Delhi sewer. Or are you not even aware that this happens in America? You sound like the closest you've ever come to actually knowing a poor person is tossing a quarter to a homeless man in the subway.
Well, just for starters, they're suffering from entirely treatable diseases and injuries...
If that were the case, the increasing access to health care should make them healthier. It didn't.
http://www.nber.org/oregon/ http://www.nber.org/oregon/
Do you have evidence for childhood malnutrition?
Once you come up with a definition of "rotting, roach-infested", feel free to check what fraction of poor Americans actually fit that definition. See table 2-4: http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf
Suffice it to say, probably the majority of my friends are poor by American standards. But then again, I live in India. And even when I was a poor American I still lived better than they do. Though I'm usually told that grad school doesn't count as poverty, even though the economics of it are the same.
There is tremendous long run psychological and physical harm associated with living paycheck to paycheck in perpetual debt having to eat subpar foodstuffs because fruits and vegetables cost way more than dollar menu cheeseburgers per calorie. And if you don't have a working kitchen you can't cook farmers market produce.
And that is at best. A lot of us are unemployed, and families are collapsing in on themselves as you have fewer and fewer breadwinners.
There is tremendous long run psychological and physical harm associated with living paycheck to paycheck
This is entirely in the control of most poor Americans. India's GDP/capita is $5500 after adjusting for cost of living, yet India has a 20% savings rate. Poor Americans could reduce consumption and save if they wished.
in perpetual debt having to eat subpar foodstuffs because fruits and vegetables cost way more than dollar menu cheeseburgers per calorie.
Poor Americans tend to be fat. That means they can reduce calories and increase the quality of food while spending the same amount of money.
And if you don't have a working kitchen you can't cook farmers market produce.
3% of poor Americans lack a complete kitchen (see table 2-4).
http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf
tl;dr; Poor Americans have some self inflicted problems. That's not much of an argument for protectionism against poor Bangladeshi's suffering from externally inflicted problems.
I've been traveling in SE Asia for the past 4 months, including China (not yet India). I've been in urban slums and poor rural villages. I also went to university in West Philadelphia, so I've spent a bit of time in an American "inner city".
I'd take the rural village or even the urban slum over the American inner city any day.
It might look from the outside that life "is entirely in the control of most poor Americans". But nothing could be further from the truth. The amount of forces conspiring against you as a student or young would-be worker in the ghetto is simply unfathomable to anyone with a middle-class or wealthier background (like myself). I'd argue you have a much better chance at moving up in the world as a poor person in Vietnam than America. There, you start a small business (eg; selling goods on the street) and work hard to grow it. Here, you can't just do that: people don't buy anything off the street. And don't tell me "they can just learn to code": I tried to teach them. They don't have computers. Not in the schools. Not at home.
Also, consider that unhealthy foods are often genuinely addicting and addictions are really, really hard to break. Especially when you're stretched then.
I don't want this to turn into a rant, so I'll just say that before you start blaming the American poor for their problems, spend some time living there, talking to them, and understanding their problems.
> The only concrete answer I usually hear is envy
Then I don't think you've really been listening. Their lives are extremely unpleasant. Spend some time in a poor neighborhood in America, talking to people. I haven't read it but the book On the Run by Alice Goffman might paint some helpful vignettes.
95% for china and India?
China is already a middle income country, India is a high lower income country. if you want poor, look at Africa.
Why should we care about people in India or China? We're entitled to shape our society the way we want, and to address the local ills we see fit to address. Our predecessors worked very hard so that we would be richer than India and China and have the luxury of figuring out how to better the lives of urban "poor" who have cable TV.
The premise underlying my post is the belief that all humans have equal moral value. I gather you don't hold this view and therefore will disagree.
However, if you favor some sort of protectionism, I'm curious why you think I should care about poor Americans. Supposing I were to give up humanism and revert to tribalism, as you seem to have done, why would I allow poor Americans into my tribe? Why not simply define my tribe as wealthy white males?
(I personally have practical reasons not to do this. A minority of my friends are American and a smaller minority of the Americans are white males. But those are just practicalities, not moralities.)
I'm also curious whether you favor imperialism. After all, if our goal is simply to maximize American utility, why not just pillage and plunder everyone else?
As everyday Americans, we simply do not have the power to directly influence other countries. The world does not operate as a border-less, humanistic, and unified entity. It is not a matter of protectionism and/or tribalism, but practicality. I don't believe it is very easy to influence politics outside of my state, let alone the country. IMO, comparing the plights of people across these 'imaginary borders' is of little help in this context.
We don't have the power to influence our own country either - your vote simply doesn't matter.
In any case, I'm not advocating for political change overseas. I'm simply advocating against threatening people with violence for engaging in mutually agreeable trade. I.e., if I want to hire an Indian person to work as my secretary, it's not right to forbid this in order to force me to hire an American.
While I think your point is valid (that the majority of suffering is not in the United States), I just want to point out that there are still some people who don't have enough food or basic utilities in the States, and I'm not even referring to the homeless problem that some cities have. Look to deeply depressed rural areas like small mountain-pass towns post-industrialism, and look to the poorest of the poor inner city neighborhoods. Hunger, illiteracy, disease, these haven't been eradicated yet.
> What, precisely, do you believe poor Americans are suffering from? The only concrete answer I usually hear is envy (I.e. "oh noes the inequality").
Even if that was the only thing and the only source of suffering for poor Americans was relative deprivation compared to others in their immediate context, so what? Relative deprivation is an important, extensively empirically demonstrated, source of disutility. If one is interested in alleviating actual human suffering that exists, rather than artificially creating self-justifying excuses to defend perpetuating suffering, one would recognize that it is an important problem (not necessarily something which we should blindly bear every cost to minimize, as doing so may at some point do more to exacerbate other sources of suffering than it does to alleviate the suffering directly attributable to relative deprivation, but likewise something that should be considered, weighed, and addressed to the extent practical without doing more harm than good.)
You should watch the 30 Days episode about living on minimum wage. It is not a life you would want to live.
>>lives in far deeper poverty than poor americans
This is disgusting drivel written by someone who is so out-of-touch with the reality of poverty as to reduce anything they might write about the subject completely worthless and without meaning. America has populations that suffer from the same abject poverty as anywhere else in the world. They may be an incredibly small percentage of our total population when compared to those living in abject poverty in India or China, but don't you FOR ONE MINUTE peddle your disgusting drivel about American poverty consisting of "envy."
You entitled, ridiculous worthless POS!!!
No offense, but you are just ignorant :/
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/food-insecurity-affects-50-million-americans/story?id=13206053 http://abcnews.go.com/Health/food-insecurity-affects-50-mill...
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-report/err173.aspx http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r...
So, 14.3% of US Households don't have enough food. Food insecurity is another way of saying "Hey, we may not eat today but we eat enough calories on average to survive.".
You think these people are paying their power bills over food? Seriously?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/18/american-recession-food-insecurity_n_5681559.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/18/american-recession-...
"69 percent of households that rely on food charities to survive have been forced to choose between paying for utilities and paying for food."
"66 percent of households said they’ve had to choose between paying for food and paying for medicine or medical care. Thirty-one percent said they had to make that choice every month."
I'm guessing some people are letting the power bill go unpaid based on that, eh?
So when you say its "Envy" are you saying you are ignorant or that 14.3% of the people in this country are envious, ungrateful bastards for thinking they deserve 3 square meals a day?
Food insecurity is another way of saying "Hey, we may not eat today but we eat enough calories on average to survive.".
You seem to be confusing "food security" with "very low food security".
http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/definitions-of-food-security.aspx http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/foo...
None of these things are hunger, however.
So when you say its "Envy" are you saying you are ignorant or that 14.3% of the people in this country are envious, ungrateful bastards for thinking they deserve 3 square meals a day?
The natural consequence of not getting enough food is weight loss. Where are the skinny poor people? Note that here in India, even in a well developed city, they aren't hard to find. In the poor parts of the US where I've lived, you mostly just see fat people.
> You seem to be confusing "food security" with "very low food security".
From the link:
"Food insecurity—the condition assessed in the food security survey and represented in USDA food security reports—is a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food."
"reports of reduced quality"
What do you think quality means in a nutritional context? How it tastes? No, that is desirability.
> The natural consequence of not getting enough food is weight loss. Where are the skinny poor people? Note that here in India, even in a well developed city, they aren't hard to find. In the poor parts of the US where I've lived, you mostly just see fat people.
You do realize you can just eat a bunch of starchy foods and suffer malnutrition but not lose weight right?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/malnutrition-obesity_b_1324760.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/malnutrition-obe...
I think the issue here is you are trying to be pedantic without understanding the context of the words being used. That and complete ignorance of "sufficient calories to gain weight" != "3 square meals a day".
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/balanced http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...
"(Especially of food) having different elements in the correct proportions:
a healthy, balanced diet"
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/square-meal http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...
"A substantial, satisfying, and balanced meal:"
So your argument is basically:
"Well 14.3% are alive and not starving to death"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100512141912.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100512141912.ht...
2-3,000 people a year die from malnutrtion in the US.
> The natural consequence of not getting enough food is weight loss. Where are the skinny poor people? Note that here in India, even in a well developed city, they aren't hard to find. In the poor parts of the US where I've lived, you mostly just see fat people.
This isn't evidence either btw. Its anecdotal. You are refusing 5% of the population doesn't get enough to eat and people dying every year in the US as "well, I don't see it".
But hey, 2-3,000 people dying a year isn't a problem for you eh? Because its just envy. Nope. No material impact whatsoever.
Don't discount the economic impact of a human emotion. The entire global economy operates on what billions of humans want, and a good portion of them don't even need most of the things that they want.
We have an entire industry--advertising--devoted to making people want more things.
So something like envy, which is to say wanting something that someone else has, is a significant driving factor behind economic activity. Mental suffering and physical suffering amount to the same thing: unhappiness with the current state of affairs. It does not matter if one person wants to not die of cholera while another wants a new smartphone with a faster processor. It only matters what that person is willing to do or to forego to get that thing.
The first person may be willing to spend a week with a shovel in a pit filled with sewage to get adequate sanitation for the rest of the year. The second person already has a flush toilet, complete with sewer and treatment plant, so maybe they're just giving up new tires for their second car.
All of economics is just individual humans making choices about what they want.
Poor Americans have been told throughout their lives that they can have a certain lifestyle--pretty good in comparison to a lot of other countries--if they are willing to follow certain rules and spend some time working rather than playing. Many of them are finding that to be a lie. So perhaps they are suffering instead from a perceived betrayal of a social compact? Everyone willing to produce shall be able to consume in equal measure?
What I am seeing through my biased eyes is that significant limitations are being placed on ordinary people's ability to produce valuable goods and services, and so their ability to consume is falling below that required by their former customary standard of living.