121–130 of 251 posts
I highly doubt the veracity of the article about the SUV driving young man and the vegetable seller; this story confirms your worst stereotypes about India and gets eyeballs but it is bullshit. I would like to point out that poor people in India are a very well represented : Communist part and Marxist parties are doing very well in India. Every political party courts the votes of poor people. If you pull shit like th…
This does not just apply in India. A long time ago, I had a job soliciting donations door to door in the US. We did all we could to avoid the rich neighborhoods and actively sought out the poor minority neighborhoods. People in those neighborhoods with only two dollars would give one to help others. In the rich neighborhoods, they would call the police the moment they saw you. If I ever had to have a heart attack in…
In the UK a lot of door to door collecting for charities is done by private companies who take a significant chunk of the donation for themselves. Perhaps richer people are more likely to know this and be sceptical of door to door collections. They may also value their time more and not like being "hassled". This does not necessarily mean that they do not provide charity donations. They may just do it in a smarter wa…
Smarter = self-serving?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You know what these people call themselves? Middle class. They refuse to acknowledge that they are wealthy. No, they've got it right. The distinction between middle class and lower class is entirely about wealth, but the distinction between middle class and upper class is not. Wealth is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for being upper class; the distinguishing features are flexibility and power, not money.…
I agree: upper class isn't about wealth. So much of it is about culture (in the sense that culture breeds character traits). And the ambition to obtain wealth in the middle class breeds character traits that impose a barrier for entering the upper class.
Care to elaborate on said traits?
There is an implied causality in this article. Being rich -> Lose empathy. I'd be curious to know if there indeed is causality in either direction (Less empathetic people get richer) or is it just correlation masquerading as causality.
You can find elsewhere an study about how psycopaths are usually found in leading positions, like politicians (specially in 3rd world, where salaries are high) and CEOs, amongst others.
Who are the 'poor' in India?
The poor in India, according to the Planning Commission, are people who live on 32 Indian Rupees/59cents per day.
How many people are poor in India?
The Planning Commission of India reports that there are 29.8% of the population who are 'poor' [0,1]. This roughly equates to 360 Million people who live below the poverty line.
Are the numbers for poor accurate?
May be, may be not. Some believe these numbers could be as high as 77% specially considering the inflation rate and other factors.
Is it possible to live on 59 cents per day?
No but that's not even the main problem. Here is a comment from Jean Dréze, an economist and former member of the National Advisory Council India [2],
“What is really shocking is not that the official poverty line is abysmally low, but that even with that abysmal
benchmark, so many people are below it.The belated discovery that it is impossible to have a dignified
life on the official poverty line draws our attention to the appalling living conditions of the Indian poor.” Taking a
position diametrically opposed to Mr. Bhalla and Mr. Panagariya, Mr. Drèze argues, “The message about the terrifying
nature of 'hidden poverty’ in India has been somewhat lost in the din of the recent debate.”
Is there a class divide in India (in particular Delhi) and possess a sense of entitlement?
Yes. I would recommend reading on how the elite tried to stifle Delhi's first Bus Rapid Transit system by filing a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Delhi HC [3]. Here is the reason from the petitioner's (a car owner in Delhi) on why he decided to file the petition
"Car owners are the creators of wealth. Do you realise that they get exhausted sitting in their cars due to traffic
jams and they reach office completely tired? It affects their efficiency. Do you want them to perform less?" asks the
main petitioner BB Sharan.You cannot keep a commander-in-chief waiting in traffic while his army is waiting for his
orders. How does it matter if a peon reaches office five minute before time?"
[0] http://planningcommission.nic.in/news/press_pov1903.pdf
[1] http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/genrep/rep_pov.pdf
[2] http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/what-does-indias-p...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may not know this but you are touching a very sensitive issue. Which is better for the country: asking people to employ domestic workers, or have higher unemployment? Let's take South Africa, which I know better than any place in Asia. There's high unemployment. The government encourages people to hire domestic workers. Checking now the rates are about US$ 1/hour. These are maids/domestics, gardeners, childminder…
The solution of course is higher taxation or philanthropy. The gardener should be paid to build a public garden, not private garden. You should be paying someone who is more efficient than you at those tasks, so you can write software to solve problems more efficiently than your customers do otherwise. That is wealth creation across a community. You should not be paying someone (x N) to work at a much lower hourly wa…
I don't see the "of course." Using that argument, it sounds like I shouldn't hire a carpenter to work on my house but should instead pay more taxes so that the carpenter can work on improving the public buildings, and only use my own skills and time to improve my house.
I shouldn't ever hire a mechanic to fix my car but rather I should always pay more taxes in order to fund the mass transit system.
I shouldn't ever hire a gardener but should rather let the existing garden in my yard fall into disrepair - or learn the skills myself - in preference for a neighborhood garden.
"You should not be paying someone (x N) to work at a much lower hourly wage than you simply because you have accumulated more wealth."
I never held that position, and I don't know how you inferred that that I had that assumption in mind.
There is some boundary on where it's better for myself and/or the community that I do something myself, and better sometimes for others with more time and/or better skills to do it. My argument is that one of the reasons that people don't hire domestic help is because of moral qualms. Sometimes those qualms are unfounded, and in that case, an educational campaign to change attitudes may be an appropriate means to mollify those qualms and improve wealth creation across a community.
In your words, they are doing something less efficiently than they could, and need a reminder backed by a good argument for why they should hire someone else to handle those jobs.
"simply because you have accumulated more wealth"
That is part of a different argument. The mathematics I outlined are based on differential income, not wealth accumulation. That is, had I spent every penny of income or contributed it through taxes, such that I had less wealth accumulation than my gardener, it would still make economic sense for me to hire a gardener instead of tending to the garden myself. As you said, your goal is 'wealth creation across a community'. The scenarios I described are not incompatible with that goal. I can outline others if you wish.
Also, at that time my work was very bursty. I would sometimes visit a client site for a month or two, then not work for a few months. Her work was relatively constant, so she could maintain my garden while I was away. Even if I maintained the garden myself, I don't think it would be morally or economically objectionable to hire someone for that case. It can be even be worthwhile to hire someone on a continual basis, in order to ensure availability during odd times.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that being middle class is not about representing any kind of median level of wealth in a population (or other relative measure), but rather has something to do with the kind of resources and income you have access to relative to human needs in an absolute sense. For example, if some, but not all (or even most), of your family members need to work in order to maintain a comfortable lifestyle (which includes h…
You're right. However, the difference in India lies in the fact that the lower-income people are .. middle class. Poor people in India are without any real income. Most of them struggle to get two meals a day. A lot of them live on under $2/day without access to food, shelter, sanitation or any type of medical facility. The stark contrast between such a person and another that drives around in an air conditioned SUV…
Part of the issue is that lots of people talk about the USA being a "classless society". Some of them even believe it. More than most nations, America loves the idea that a person can arrive as a poor immigrant or be born the child of poor immigrants, apply uncommon drive and intelligence, and create a business that makes him extremely rich. (Whether that is the rule or the rare exception is another question.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's plenty of right-wing people in the middle and lower classes.
The claim made (right or wrong) was that the problem was not being an elite, but having certain ideology. In other words, that class is not the real issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are countless cases of where rich people would push poor people on bikes off the road and into ditches with their cars. That would be a serious crime in the USA. If you did that, and you got caught, you would be in very serious trouble. And, it would not matter how rich you were. That's assault, perhaps with intent to harm or kill and civilized society does not tolerate it.
> it would not matter how rich you were. Which USA do you live in?
There's a great scene in "Michael Clayton" where a rich banker calls his lawyer because he hit a bicyclist in his car and fled the scene. The lawyer basically tells him: "I don't know what you think I can do for you, you're fucked." It's a realistic depiction of this situation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-ckEptxp3s.