No linen shirt is also a kind of poverty
“Ice Cream Assassin” refers to an ice cream that stabs you with its high price when paying. “Umbrella assassin” refers to an umbrella that stabs you with its high price when paying. There are also a number of “assassin” titles, each given to items that are priced above our usual price expectations for their category.
When these witty “assassins” occupy our sights, we tend to forget that behind this is a general stagnation or decline in income and rising prices for other more necessary goods. The soaring international prices of corn and soybeans have also driven up domestic pork prices. Who are the people who stop at the vegetable market? When we are dissatisfied with the daily delivery fee of ten yuan, and the Didi drivers who have been reduced due to the burden of oil prices, we often do not think about how people with lower incomes and heavier burdens can survive this period of economic downturn.
Not being able to afford the “ice cream assassin” may not be a form of poverty, but difficulties in starting a business, farming, and doing odd jobs mean poverty. Living on discounted bread at the airport means poverty, and being unable to pay rent means poverty. Not being able to buy fresh food during the lockdown also means poverty. As Adam Smith once observed, in Europe two hundred years ago, no linen shirt was poverty.
Poverty cannot be measured by a simple “poverty line”, and even people above the poverty line will experience an unbearable “poverty” at different levels. The Sri Lankan news also proves that the “sense of poverty” can reach every class from the bottom up in special times. Today, I re-read Poverty and Famine, written by Indian economist Amartya Sen in 1981, to re-measure our distance from poverty.
Poverty and Famine (book excerpt)
Author: Amartya Sen
Translator: Wang Yu and Wang Wenyu
01
Hunger is when some people don’t get enough food, not when enough food doesn’t exist in the real world.
02
The movie “Afterimage”
Unless a person goes hungry voluntarily, we can say that hunger is basically a reflection of human beings on food ownership. Therefore, to explain the phenomenon of starvation, it is necessary to delve into the structure of ownership.
03
“I Am Blake”
A person’s ability to avoid starvation depends on his ownership, and the mapping of exchange rights he faces… Even if hunger is caused by food shortages, the immediate cause of hunger is a decline in the individual’s exchange rights.
04
Whatever the factors that affect the welfare of the poor, the focus of the concept of poverty must be the welfare of the poor. The causes of poverty and the consequences of poverty are two entirely different and important issues.
05
We must realize that the poverty of the poor within a country and the poverty or wealth of a country are two entirely different issues.
06
The movie “Alive”
Poverty does not mean inequality, and inequality does not mean poverty.
07
Movie “Out of My World”
We cannot completely separate the “poverty situation” from the “poverty sense”. To judge the “poverty situation” objectively, we must objectively understand the “poverty sense”.
08
The movie “Afterimage”
Adam Smith made this clear 200 years ago:
The necessities of life, as I understand them, include not only those things necessary for the maintenance of life, but also things which, without them, would be considered immoral by social convention, even for the lowest class. A linen shirt, for example, is not strictly necessary to sustain life. My guess is that the Greeks and Romans could have lived comfortably without linen shirts. But today, in much of Europe, without linen shirts, a decent casual worker would be ashamed to show up in public. The lack of linen village shirts became a sign of disgrace and poverty, and it seemed to people that only the most ill-behaved would fall into such a state. In England, custom, in the same way, once regarded leather shoes as a necessity of life. Without them, even the poorest decent people, regardless of gender, would be ashamed to be seen in public.
09
Karl Marx also pointed out in similar language that when “historical and moral factors” enter into the concept of the minimum standard of living, “in a given country, at a given period, a minimum standard of living is necessary for a worker and necessary for a minimum living standard. mean the average quality of life is well known.”
The movie “The Fool in Dangerous Building”
10
“I Am Blake”
The measure of poverty must then be seen as a description, an evaluation of the difficult situation of people according to the then prevailing standards of necessities. Such an evaluation is basically a description of the facts, not some kind of ethical evaluation.
11
Famine means hunger and not vice versa; hunger means poverty and vice versa.
12
The movie “The Fool in Dangerous Building”
Monetary wage workers on farms or other occupations are of course more vulnerable to catastrophe as climate change or other factors such as “derived poverty” lead to a dramatic deterioration in the employment environment. That said, while commercialization offers new economic opportunities, it also makes it harder for the Sahel to avoid the effects of natural disasters.
13
“I Am Blake”
For vulnerability to food problems directly, a mechanism is needed to ensure everyone’s right to food through public institutions. This right includes not only food distribution during disasters, but also longer-term entitlement arrangements through social insurance and employment security. What we need to do is not to guarantee the “food supply”, but to protect the “food right”.
14
Movie “Why Home”
Food-centric views also rarely explain hunger. It cannot tell us why hunger occurs when the food supply is not reduced; nor can it tell us why some people cry with hunger and cold while others are full of fat, even when hunger is accompanied by a reduction in the food supply. The presentation of total food is an economic variable too far away for the explanation of hunger. On the other hand, if we turn our attention to some special class with food, then we have more to say about the phenomenon of starvation, but this is only a description of the famine, not an explanation of what happened . Some people are starving, apparently because they don’t have enough food. Why don’t they have enough food? Why do some people and not others control the available food?
15
The movie “Drifting”
The use of rights method requires classification according to some distinction. Both a small farmer and a landless laborer can be poor, but their fates vary. When analyzing the reasons why they are vulnerable to hunger, we must not simply regard them as members of the huge ranks of the poor, but as members of a special class, belonging to a specific occupation, with different resource endowments, and governed by different power relations. In some cases, for some purpose, we can divide the population into rich and poor, but such divisions are not sufficient for the analysis of hunger, famine and even poverty.
16
The movie “Silent Life”
If economic prosperity manifests itself as a widening of social inequalities (e.g. in favor of urban populations over rural labor), then the process of prosperity itself may be a cause of famine. In the struggle for market control or dominance, some people will suffer because of the prosperity of others, “Devil taking the hindmost”.
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The poor are not the culprits of poverty
but its product
Understanding Poverty from the Perspectives of Institutions, Identity and Globalization
Click on the purchase list to read the new book “The Texture of Poverty”
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