Katherine Boo really knows what she is talking about. I was born there and I know how difficult is for westerns to comprehend why a country like India blatantly exposes the limitations (leave alone a panacea) of that invisible hand, socialism and all the other economic "theories".
Read her full interview here and please make it a point to read her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity this year. May be this will help you to be less politically polarized (for both red and blue and well libertarians too) and may be re-route that instead energy to the prefrontal cortex on fixing one devil at a time that is in the details.
When I first started going to India, I’d be at these dinner tables where people, claiming a posture of great authority, talked about what was going on in these historically poor communities. They always seemed to fall into two schools of thought: everything had changed with the country’s increasing prosperity, or nothing had changed in the lives of low-income people. I wasn’t a subscriber to either. In fact, I was familiar with these arguments from my experience of writing about the poor in the United States. Most of the people who do the talking about what it’s like for the very poor don’t spend much time with them. That circumstance transcends borders.
Going in, I didn’t think so much about what I could add, but what I didn’t know: how people get out of poverty. As a reporter, you know the tropes of how stories on poverty work in any country. A reporter will go to an NGO and say, “Tell me about the good work that you’re doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give.” It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos in which almost every poor person you read about is involved with a NGO helping him. Our understanding of poverty and how people escape from poverty, in any country, is quite distorted.
Read her full interview here and please make it a point to read her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity this year. May be this will help you to be less politically polarized (for both red and blue and well libertarians too) and may be re-route that instead energy to the prefrontal cortex on fixing one devil at a time that is in the details.
When I first started going to India, I’d be at these dinner tables where people, claiming a posture of great authority, talked about what was going on in these historically poor communities. They always seemed to fall into two schools of thought: everything had changed with the country’s increasing prosperity, or nothing had changed in the lives of low-income people. I wasn’t a subscriber to either. In fact, I was familiar with these arguments from my experience of writing about the poor in the United States. Most of the people who do the talking about what it’s like for the very poor don’t spend much time with them. That circumstance transcends borders.
Going in, I didn’t think so much about what I could add, but what I didn’t know: how people get out of poverty. As a reporter, you know the tropes of how stories on poverty work in any country. A reporter will go to an NGO and say, “Tell me about the good work that you’re doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give.” It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos in which almost every poor person you read about is involved with a NGO helping him. Our understanding of poverty and how people escape from poverty, in any country, is quite distorted.
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