Poverty is caused by economic development.

[Senior citizen]

Indigenous peoples who haven't been touched by economic development, may not have any money, but they aren't poor.

They have homes, which they build themselves and don't have to pay rent on.

They have food, which they hunt, gather, and grow, and don't have to buy.

They have clothing, if their climate or culture requires it, which they also make themselves from whatever is available and appropriate.

And they have culture, in the form of music, dance, stories, and art.

All this without having what we call jobs.

The minute "economic development" comes in, however, they become poor. They are forced off their land so that it can be farmed or robbed of minerals or oil. Once forced off their land, they no longer have food, clothing and shelter without having to pay for it, so they need jobs. Since they are not schooled in technology, they have few marketable skills, and usually find only the most menial jobs are open to them. So they now have money, but usually not enough to live on. Their diet becomes less varied, their lifestyles less healthy, and they cannot afford medical care.

Without economic development, they wouldn't have had any money, but they wouldn't have been poor.

[LostInAnomie]

1. I have never understood where the idea of private property developed.

When society was at it's most basic did some guy just decide "Hey, this stuff is mine and you can't have it" and then it carried on from there.

It is amazing that we have cornerstone of our society developed from some greedy ass caveman.

[Maple]

2. Sigh...and they die young

and never learn anything.

This is how cavemen lived. Surely you want better than that for humanity.

[MercutioATC]

4. Agreed. There's no real comparison.

[Sugarbleus]

3. Great Post!

Even in this "developed" society, I try to resort to the barter system as often as I can....

Can't say how often I've dreamed of a simple society. Where events surrounding living are streamlined into easy to access pieces.

I'll never own anything...I've been driven downward. I have no "Home"/no PLACE to call my space, built by my hands or by others, in "The Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.."

I think about such things often....One family, one dwelling FOR ALL.

I long for the golden age of which you speak. *sigh*

[Maple]

5. There never was any 'golden age'

There was poverty, starvation, death from minor complaints, same old war there has always been, and ignorance.

Ignorance is not bliss, it kills people.

The earth is NOT the Garden of Eden, and survival is still the first rule of Life.

Anyone who forgets that...doesn't survive.

[Senior citizen]

6. I didn't say there was a "golden age."

Are you saying that we don't have poverty, starvation, death from minor complaints, the same old war there has always been, and ignorance, here, now, today?

Because if you are, you must live in a bubble.

We have poverty because of a much more unequal distribution of wealth than in indigenous societies.

We have starvation in countries with plenty of food, because it is exported and the people who live there can't afford to buy it.

We have death from minor complaints right here in the U.S., among the millions who lack health coverage.

The war continues and people are dying.

And as for ignorance, well, we've even got some of that on DU.

I remember the first time I went to Mexico, many years ago. I was astonished to find that poor people were baking fresh tortillas for every meal. You won't find that in urbanized Mexico any more. But I couldn't believe that people I had been told were poor and backwards, ate oven-fresh bread with every meal, while I had never been that fortunate.

In the Hindu Kush mountains of north-eastern Afghanistan, I found people living in towns that had no stores. They ground their own flour and baked seven different types of bread. They built their own houses, carved their own chairs and utensils, wove their own clothes, and occasionally went down to Jalalabad or Kabul or over to Pakistan to trade their goods for things they didn't have. They had little or no money, but they weren't poor.

Economic development is sometimes erroneously equated with civilization. The dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest, reality that you speak of, is actually the law of the jungle, not civilization. A civilized society would be more like a garden than a jungle. But the only places I've seen signs of civilization are among indigenous peoples who haven't been completely conquered by economic developers.

On Democracy Now the other day, Amy Goodman interviewed John Perkins, the author of a book called, "Confessions of an Economic Hitman." Perkins knows that economic development causes poverty, because for much of his life that was how he made his living.

[indigo32]

7. I agree

but I don't think we'll ever put that genie back in the bottle. All we can do is work for justice. Labor laws would be a start.

[Slowhand16]

12. agreed.

[Senior citizen]

8. Ten thousand homeless in San Diego county.

I was struck by that headline on the front page of a San Diego Spanish-language newpaper, so I bought it. Basically the article says that due to economic instability, the high cost of rent, and job layoffs, San Diego has 10,000 people living in the streets.

They went to several shelters and charities, and they interviewed people who worked there and some of their clients. One was a Navy vet who said that he didn't have any savings when he was discharged, and it had never occurred to him that he wouldn't find a good job when he got out.

"Esto no le pasa solo a los borrachitos y drogadictos, me paso a mi, y las puede pasar a cualquiera," comento el veterano.

I'm not a translator, but I think that says:

"This doesn't just happen to drunks and junkies, it happened to me, and it could happen to anyone," said the veteran.

I guess 10,000 homeless people must mean that San Diego is a very economically developed city.

[sangh0]

9. Amy Chua's "World on Fire" explains much of this

In many of these cultures, there is an ethnic minority that is disproportionately represented in the commercial class. "Development" tends to benefit them, widening the gap in incomes between the indigenous people and the ethnic minorities, which results in increased ethnic tensions.

[Nikia]

10. I think that there is a problem with specialization

In capitalism, jobs are specialized. Each worker has a specific job, working for an owner who pays them a wage for this work. This wage is based on the market, the wage at which the worker could be replaced. It is not based on the worker's overall talents, ability, or amount of work. One could argue that the better, more talented worker would have oppurtunities to be paid more but it is not always the case. Being well rounded is not necessary in specialized labor and one must convince an owner of one's talents and abilities. Some people who suffer under this system would do quite well if they were allowed to farm their own land, build their own homes, and make other things on their own as well, to be their own owner. Others would do well having their own business if they only had enough capital and understanding of law.

[undergroundpanther]

11. Could it be

"econnomic development"
Requires a large amount of people to either be in poverty and trauma ,or threatened/scarred by it to keep people in a certain belief cage,so they will work thier whole lives without considering why, and so they'll accept this life of servitude? They are taught from childhood to think get a job,be "sucessful" better your life, so they will not walk away from these parasites on the human spirit called "economies" and take back thier lives build a community that is not ruled by the dollar and live another way than the way thier parents and this culture forced on them and that the 'market' teaches everyone is the ONLY way to live which is this way.How long can we exploit this Earth OUR wealth, by letting a few liars addict us to "consumer goods while we chase carrots like dumb mules on an unequal,divided,competitive,traumatized disconnected,treadmill that really only benifiets the biggest bullies,the nastiest sociopaths,the greediest nartcissists, and sneakyest robbers??

When do we bite the hands of the rich opressors and turn away and say fuck you to thier carrots?

The minute we do ,I think than the truth of what they are about comes out.Suddenly the mask of sanity and"negotiation"is gone and the guns come out the weapons,the police state bullshit,and the facists bully or manipulate people who redfuse to accept the yoke,( revolutions are undermined over and over with a charismatic leader to fix the way of life back to like it was before for the weary half of the rebels scared of freedom for the first time in thier lives) back into this way of life.Than the movement that was rebellious is led to fossilize itself into beaurocracy and top down hierarchy again.The "freedom fighters" can thrpugh assocuiation with the concept of eletism and power become the new boss same as the old boss,when power corrupts.

Why not get rid of bosses and keep your own power refuse to give ANYONE authority over you??

If a leader is sought by weary fighters aganst an opressor a narcissist or bully with a posse of syncophants will step up everytime to "organize".Leaders and so called big men have a personality problem a conduct disorder that leads them to assume they are entitled to lead,to more rewards than anyone else get,more consideration,status,that thier vote is more important than anyone elses,These kinds of sick Personalities being given power ARE a problem tp any community.They are not to be trusted. Humankind needs to learn to not trust popular,flattering,insincere,abusive charismatic people, to stop letting popular people,liars,greedheads, control freaks,bullies,abusers,marketing types,big egos, and manipulators guide us to our freedom as THEY would define it for us, because "leaders" don't want people to be free really especially if it cuts into thier 'narcissistic supply' 'appearance'and wallets..

The problem is traumatized people can be deliberately manipulated to be off thier "game" so they are not able to catch manipulation.People who are traumatized are easier confused when they are faced with a charming, two faced, manipulator using cognitive dissonence,threats and catch 22s and the projective bullies use to keep power in thier own hands. Stockholm Syndrome and Horatio Algier are blood brothers.
Bullies and leader liars employ psychological-cognitive-neuro linguistic,behavior modification , trance and cocercion techiques some sophisticated some not, all the time to confuse people and keep them subjugated.

[jwirr]

13. I think that we could have economic

development that would not cause poverty if we had economics as if people mattered. I remember a friend from Nigeria who talked about the American soap factory that came to his community. They enticed the people to move off their land and closer to the factory. This lose of land was the real problem. If that factory had supplimented their earnings from the land instead of replacing it they would have had the best of situations. Robert Kennedy (the first) wrote in one of his books about the need for land redistribution in Mexico that 14% if the people owned 95% of the land and the rest lived in cities. It is development without concern for the people that destroys us. In our own country urbanization was driven by consolidation of farms due to bigger and better equipment so that we no longer needed intensive farm labor, coupled with the need for factory workers.

It is interesting that I just read an article either on Common Dreams or Buzz Flash about a group of environmentalists who are going to build a city of 6000 homes that will be environment friendly. It will be interesting to see how that works out.

[Jackie97]

14. I see what you're saying.

At the same time, there undeveloped nations are the same nations that come to us and the UN for help when there's a famine because they haven't developed enough to survive without our help.

Isn't there a middle ground that can be reached here?

I keep thinking it would help a lot if their means of development wasn't often through the corrupt IMF.

[oscar111]

15. Secure P. vs. Insecure P. :and, post more!, S C

Love your posts, SC. Very educational. Pls post more often for those of us still learning much of the LW lore.

I would add another illuminating comparison:

Secure Poverty.. is not so bad.. sort of what SC described in his tribal people..it is like monks have, or hippies on their communes... no one owns much, but all have the use of the monastery's vast wealth. It is the end result of Jesus' commandment Luke 18:22 "sell all and give the money to the poor". After the poor then give it back and we then give it to them again, we settle on putting the wealth in a pile for no one to own, but all to use as needed. No fear, much happiness.

INsecure Poverty.. is bad. B..A..D. It is what SC described in part two. No jobs, no food, much fear. "the poor man is everyone's slave" Thus, No freedom.

As to SC's re with the navy vet, i add 1/3 of the hmless are just very poor people.. a third are adicts, a third are sick mentally or physically.

105 Trillion is US wealth. 3OO Billion would end all US poverty.

If you dont like grants to end poverty, if you must see folks work for money, then...A WPA would help as another road to ending poverty.. job shortage is now 14 million.

wesalth---->
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/current/accessible/l5.htm bottom line

[AndyTiedye]

16. Doesn't Scale

> They have food, which they hunt, gather, and grow, and don't have to buy.

Except when they don't. When there's famine, they die. This has gotten
to be a really big problem in parts of Africa. Some of the farmland
is looking more like desert. Sustinance agriculture breaks down when
the population exceeds the carrying capacity of the land.

Sustinance agriculture cannot possibly feed more than a fraction
of the world's population.

[Dark]

17. Economic Development doesn't cause poverty.

Poverty is far too complex an issue to be reduced to simply one cause. Ignorance causes it, both igonrance of the impoverished and the rich. Addiction causes it, bigotry causes it, misfortune causes it, and, yes, laziness DOES cause some poverty. One common feature that I notice contributes to most of these, but not all, causes is selfishness.

So, I would conjecture that the primary, but not absolute, cause of poverty is selfishness. Economic development, which actually treats people as people, usually ameliorates poverty, but doesn't eliminate it because some who suffer from poverty are ignorant, so they do not possess the knowledge nor the means to gain the knowledge. Others are addicted to drugs, which limits their reliability and therefore opportunities. And, yes, some of them are just lazy. Also, some suffer misfortune. Shit happens.

As to your example, the tribes are poor, they are in poverty, they just don't act as we do about it. Can they heal someone who is sick with pnemounia? Can they purchase food if there is a famine?

[undergroundpanther]

18. You have to decide

Is survival your highest value...or is maintaining your own INTEGRITY despite adversity?

I value my own integrity more than my own survival.I do this because everything that lives here dies. Giving into the winner takes all game is a surefire way to die inside.
You cannot win the battle for survival,because in this existance death comes for all,always.We are all vunerable to sickness,starvation,elements,injury to abuse or accidents..But despite being vunerable and perishable and not as strong,in control, or as invunerable as I would prefer to be,I can despite being merely human choose to stand up against human made inhumanities like abuse,bullying, cocercion,lies, and corruption,I can be kindhearted to others rather than act out my internal toxins on others emotions at thier expense , I can be true to myself,make my own purpose in my life that matters to ME,and live it, no matter what other people or this cultuire thinks about it.I can care about others and myself without controlling what they do or who they ar.I can,draw my own boundaries, despite my limits, and I can choose to have compassion and courage and never bow down to anything,even death or desire..It is easier to do this when you have decided winning, being safe or on top isn't as important...because surviving isn't really being alive..
Sometimes survival isn't worth anything if surviving causes more suffering than it is supposed to alleviate you know.

But living life according to your own inner purpose of your own design and walking your talk and living through your passion, finding your happiness ,knowing yourself and sharing your heart fearlessly to any who would want to know it by being there_for them_ sharing,it is a powerful thing..Love with no other ulterior motives.
Walking on a path of your own is what makes simple survival take a backseat,to your integrity, to the quality of your heart, you build your own transcendance this way.

Fearing your own death, which is inevitable, makes a motive for greed,ruthless pursuit of winning,power,aquiring more stuff and surviving life.It's that kind of crazy making game entire cultures play with each other to give themselves a feeling of false power,invunerability, security and illusions of control or material immortality.These things are lies in a unpredictable uncertain limited finate existance.Believing these huge lies is what makes damn sure you never begin living while you are here..In persuit of winning you never become free. Surviving is counterfiet freedom and you wouldn't know it is fake freedom until you stop fighting to aquire the impossible.

[gorbal]

19. Who here has studied anthropology?

"Raises hand" Now there is more poverty, more war, and more pollution than ever before in human exhistence. What do you guys think caused all this?

If you study anthropology and archeology and read books like "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" by Thom Hartmann, you will gain a more holistic understanding of why the world is the way it is. Human population has steadily been exploding after agriculture was developed and people have been developing more and more efficient methods of food production. Now that that the means of distributing this food is becoming more and more expensive you will see more and more poverty and hunger, without developing alternatives it inevitable.

More wars? When the number 1 export of the worlds most powerful country is weapons, would you expect wars to decrease?

[Senior citizen]

20. Poverty is DELIBERATELY caused by economic development.

In, "Confessions of an Economic Hitman," John Perkins explains it all from the standpoint of an insider. This is the who, how, why, where, and when of how economic development deliberately and knowingly causes poverty, destroys indigenous peoples, makes the wealthy elite wealthier, and makes everyone else poorer. When I originally posted this topic, I could see the big picture, which is covered in Winona LaDuke's book, "All Our Relations," but the Perkins book covers all the details I hadn't known. Amy Goodman did a full hour with Perkins on Democracy Now today, and the book has gone to number one on amazon.com and is on the NY Times best-seller list. Read it and weep.

[Maurkov]

21. Post hoc ergo proctor hoc

Just because poverty follows economic development does not mean it is caused by economic development. Your example is much better explained by simple theft.

Hunting and gathering require a lot of real estate. Before, the indigenous people "owned" enough land that they could survive. After, they did not.

But really, they were already poor. They were not literate. With no plumbing, electricity, or climate control, their dwellings would not be what we consider adequate. They had no tools or technology beyond what they could build. Their population was held in check by a dismal infant mortality rate or starvation. Medical care relied mostly on the placebo effect.

It is criminal to take their land from them, but I'm not sure we're doing them any big favor when we leave them alone.

[Senior citizen]

24. I think the U.S. ranks 49th in literacy.

And something like 40th in infant mortality.

Two years ago I was able to move into subsidized senior housing. Prior to that I lived 12 years on a small boat at a mooring in San Diego Bay, without plumbing, electricity, or climate control. Before that I was homeless for about 20 years. And this in what was one of the richest countries in the world.

How many millions do we have who have no medical coverage? I think we're now the only country without a national health plan.

What Perkins says it that economic development is a scam to deliberately further impoverish poor countries. That's what he did for a living--sell them on economic development to make them poorer. Those who wouldn't go for it, usually met with sudden deaths, which Perkins attributes to deliberate assassinations.

Our plumbing is a scam also. There are composing toilets, but they are expensive, and apartment dwellers like myself wouldn't be allowed to have them even if we could afford them. Mostly the toilets flush into the ocean, some places with more waste water treatment than others. There are huge dead spots in the ocean now, because it can't handle all the waste we pump into it.

When economic development comes along, people lose their land, their culture, their extended families, their communities, and their ability to provide for themselves. When your work is for yourself, your family, and your community, it isn't as onerous as when it is merely to further enrich some multinational corporation.

Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of economic human rights. That's what people lose when economic development is forced on them. That's why it usually takes massacres and genocides to impose economic development. Indigenous peoples don't give up their ways of life without a fight--but the rich people who want their land and their natural resources typically use violence to get what they want. It is, indeed criminal, and it is indeed theft, but there is no getting around the fact that economic development is the excuse given for the criminal theft of economic human rights.

[highlonesome]

22. "Mystery of Capital" by Hernando DeSoto

A really great book about why the poor can't seem to get out of poverty in developing and post communist countries.

He's a Peruvian economist who led a research team studying five countries in South America and the former Soviet Union.

One of the very interesting conclusions he comes to is that these people suffer from a LACK of good private property laws. In one case they studied -- in Peru I think -- it takes around seven years and hundreds of bureaucratic steps to purchase property legally. Since this is the case, most of the poor squat on publically or privately owned land. In the end, since the property is not deeded to them and they have no verifiable information, they can't liquify any of the assets they control.

And they control a lot. In the five countries he studied he estimates they own somewhere around $9.3 trillion in assets. It's also a big part of the reason the rainforests are being burned -- it's the only way they can obtain new farms.

The solution is for these countries to suck it up and deed them the property they control anyway and to harmonize their property law the way ours are so these hard working and innovative people can gain control of their own resources.

[highlonesome]

23. link and review

Link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465016154/qid=1105735597/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/002-5193873-1848041


A review:

It's become clear by now the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in most places around the globe hasn't ushered in an unequivocal flowering of capitalism in the developing and postcommunist world. Western thinkers have blamed this on everything from these countries' lack of sellable assets to their inherently non-entrepreneurial "mindset." In this book, the renowned Peruvian economist and adviser to presidents and prime ministers Hernando de Soto proposes and argues another reason: it's not that poor, postcommunist countries don't have the assets to make capitalism flourish. As de Soto points out by way of example, in Egypt, the wealth the poor have accumulated is worth 55 times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including that spent on building the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam.
No, the real problem is that such countries have yet to establish and normalize the invisible network of laws that turns assets from "dead" into "liquid" capital. In the West, standardized laws allow us to mortgage a house to raise money for a new venture, permit the worth of a company to be broken up into so many publicly tradable stocks, and make it possible to govern and appraise property with agreed-upon rules that hold across neighborhoods, towns, or regions. This invisible infrastructure of "asset management"--so taken for granted in the West, even though it has only fully existed in the United States for the past 100 years--is the missing ingredient to success with capitalism, insists de Soto. But even though that link is primarily a legal one, he argues that the process of making it a normalized component of a society is more a political--or attitude-changing--challenge than anything else.

With a fleet of researchers, de Soto has sought out detailed evidence from struggling economies around the world to back up his claims. The result is a fascinating and solidly supported look at the one component that's holding much of the world back from developing healthy free markets. --Timothy Murphy --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

[Mr. Grieves]

25. The best development

You're absolutely right - the best development to make is a more liberal society without strict money guidelines and specified economies (of course, as far as the term goes, this wouldn't be development). On small islands this society exists and thrives, and it is great.