Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

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The way we measure a "decreasing poverty" is extremely laden politically (like most things that are supposedly "neutrally evaluated" are supposed to be, just because they're represented as spreadsheets of numbers).

We consider that a villager living from subsistence farming and therefore having almost no use for money to be part of the very poor, less than 1$/day crowd.

Take this same peasant and send it working for some multinational company harvesting cocoa or sugar cane, under horrible, exploitative conditions for 2$ a day, and bam! poverty has been halved!

Ditto if you send him and his family in some shanty town collecting plastic on a rubbish pile, feeding on refuse : he's now making 3$ a day, poverty decreased again!

What is called "lifting out of poverty" is actually "making them a cog of a worldwide, money-based economy". That's a mixed blessing, to say the least.

If subsistence farming is preferable to being a cog in a market economy, why aren’t people switching in the opposite direction?

Well, for one, that would require you to be able to have land to do so. I would be shocked if many of these people had an actual, freely available choice on the matter.

Assume you live in a "first-world" nation, how do you propose to become a subsistence farmer?

Buy cheap land out in the middle of nowhere and start farming enough to provide food for yourself and some excess to pay expenses. There is a reason people don't do that.

The thing is, being a cog in the capitalist wheel really _is_ preferable to subsistence farming. The reality of subsistence farming is that you're living with no access to healthcare, education, often subject to food insecurity, and often lacking in basic utilities like electricity and clean water. Subsistence farming isn't all hunky dory like the Hobbits in the Shire. There's a reason people choose to escape it when given the chance

I have no idea how to find it again, but I read an article about indigenous peoples being forced off their land and into the city. They went from hunting, gathering and fishing and a life they loved to terrible slum conditions and racially motivated violence against them, up to and including murder.

They weren't actually subsistence farmers, but they did live without money before this was done to them. They were incredibly bitter.

And people forced to become cogs don't automatically gain meaningful access to things like healthcare and education, plus the education of the city people can involve horrible prejudice that is actively harmful to them for various reasons.

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