6,2011 Decemeber Development and Global Poverty
Economist: "The Bottom 1.4 Billion" http://econ.st/qDe7xU Escobar, Arturo. "The Problematization of Poverty.")
Property rights runs on capitalist trade Most of us are engaged in capitalist trade Capitalist trade is a global system The key to solving the problem of global development, is to get them involved into the system of capitalist trade and system of property rights so they can prove what they own is actually theirs and they can make profit off of it. This is a problematic idea Abstract- money, culture, information and is shaped by the world geography Most of the wealth is in the northern hemisphere. The southern half of the world has been left out in almost most of the wealth cumalation Living on less than 1$ a day population is growing rapidly and becoming more poor, infant mortality (China, India, Africa) Used to be 1.08 per day now 1.25 per day Additional problems calculation is done with "representative households" o One of the primary problems is if we want to calculate how much someone is living on per day in a country, you can not track everyone down and ask them how much they live on, it is just not practical. o You have to pick a sample of representative households and this ideal is really old and is something that we do a lot and the science of representative samples is really well understood and works really well provided that your sample is truly representative. The poor are not representative by nature in a country; they spend differently then the average household. Think back to social class in Barbara's description on how you live when you're poor and how they spend their money. They spend less in the sense that they are not spending money for a house but they spend more in terms of their income. Poor spend more. It is very expensive to be poor because you buy things in smaller amounts. People who are poor in these countries', spend more for less. Their cost of living is not evenly distributed and that is a huge fact for account like this to be missing. o This is significant because we do not have a proper sense of what the shape of the world actually is. o This raises a problem of counting the poor at all Why are poor countries poor? o Colonialism is really bad for countries. It sucks because people come in and slave you and take all your resources and leave you on your own. if
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you look at the poorest of the poorest countries, they were all colonist at one point. o Haiti for a very long time is one of the only countries that was colonized and successfully rose up and took their country back and that terrified the rest of the world and we have essential never let stop paying for it. They are poor because we freaked out because they were successfully poors. Three hundred years later they end up being devastated because they have no infrastructure. o World bank was put together to focus on financing o IMF to encourage countries that were not doing so well and was put together to help them get into the capitalist system. o Loans sound good but the problem is if you are giving a lot of money to poor countries, really powerful institutions don't generally make sure that the terms are favorable and this ended up producing most of the developed world is in debt and one of the things that this helped to produce are states that we characterized that can not provide to their people. States that are not states in a sense that we understand them. we need to be able to look at the patch of history and see who was setting the terms and who was making the loans. We have to think about the entire shape of the entire world and not one just tiny corner of it if we want to understand why each country is different in their own way Problematization and the idea that if we want to understand why something is a problem we have to look at the exact moment at which we start to call it a problem. We tend to think of global poverty as a problem but we need to think about how we got this idea that it is a problem and how the roots of the idea of it being a problem affect today. We have to go back to World War 2 cause that was the birth of IMF and the world bank. During World War 2 your thinking about strategy and resources because you need resources to support massive armies so this helped us to think about the third world in terms of places where we could organize strategies and resources that we can extract. After World War 2 we start constructing things like the World Bank and the IMF and in the process we realize that a huge section of the world is poor by our standards. We need to understand what the shape of these countries and what is going on with them. in order to understand them, we bring to the table certain assumptions. First we bring tot the table western and northern ideas of state hood of what a nation state looks like. What we like to think of as the nation state was not always the dominant model of the state organization but for a while nation states were not always dominant model. The nation state as we understand it comes for western Europe so it is growing out a very particular environment but we think of it as the only model and the model of which everything else needs to be judged. We also have to say what our healthy economy is supposed to look like. West and south coming to these countries with piles of money and saying that they will help them be states and take part of this great capitalist state if you
match up to our ideas of what a healthy economy is supposed to look like. We are bringing ideas and imposing them and puts us in certain positions of power. This is a way of thinking about and organizing the world. During this period it is not just us trying to develop nations out of the goodness of our hearts, put a lot of people think that this is something that we have to do to help their lives be better but behind that there are also a lot of ideas that our economy is doing well and we want to expand into a new market and we also want to get more resources for constructing new products. We got to where we are because of the industrial revolution and we are saying in order to be a modern nation state you must change how you produce things not only so that your economy can be better but so that you can have an infrastructure so that you can help us produce things. o This is a system that is being imposed on countries that did not arise naturally. o One of the growing pains is that they are not producing as much food and the population is getting hungry o This has an interesting affect of this idea of the demographic turn o They are being pushed into modernization and they do not have the resources to keep up and it is just backfiring. o As the cold war is happening, we see a lot of proxy conflicts and suddenly the USSR and US are fighting a war through you and this situation winds up producing a lot of poverty. All of this is kind of being brought about by certain ideas of what the proper economy looks like and the fact that we assume that we have the power to tell these countries what to do and that we look best. o Dawn of development discourse and we have things like science being really important and this idea that again that we are going to swoop in and fix people that can not fix themselves on a fundamental level. o Discource around povery