Wednesday, September 28, 2011

A Little Economic Rant

I may come from a country where little sons and daughters of doormen learn to walk in front of their buildings half naked. And I also come from a country where you see the same thing at public hospitals, you see patients sitting on the (filthy) corridor floors, or even on the streets. I have seen a woman in labour wait for her turn outside the hospital.
Yes, this is the country I call home.
The country where not everyone is educated, where people live in informal settlements and are fine with it.

But isn't that how it is everywhere? Even in "developed" countries, there are the poor, the sick and the ignorant, there are also the illiterate. And people still refer to them as the more developed country because of a larger per capita income.

But whatever happened to equity? Equity and accessibility...
Whatever happened to equitable distribution of income? Why do people forget that the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer EVERYWHERE?

Don't blame developing countries for post-colonialism, because that is just unfair. It was unfair then and it is unfair today to have "other" decide for "developing" countries what they need to do to be developed, because laundry lists will not work. They never did.

You could even see it with globalisation, which has worked best for everyone, I agree, but people from developing countries don't benefit from the great mobility that others from 1st world countries do, and as countries, they are faced by 1st world non-tariff barriers to trade. How fair is that?

How fair are restrictions on technology transfer...

I am having a hard time being a student of economics in international development in a class full of MBA student...it's depressing. It is depressing that everything is about more sales and shareholder's profit..there are people involved; human beings - not just cheap labour, you see.

Because at the end of the day, I see the poor and I see the insanely rich here, too. Duality is everywhere, people just choose to point the duality of developing countries.

God bless the middle class.

2 comments:

The Childlike Empress said...

when i was in the uk recently i realised just how difficult it was to relate to the people there what life is like in Egypt, how different it is. especially when I hear about the London riots, about people claiming to be poor and served unjustly by their government, and i wish that they could come here for a few days and learn humility.

Learn, that life isn't all about stealing televisions because you feel you are hard done by. there are people out there who get by just fine with the basic necessitaties, that their wants and needs are so different and far more humbling than the bum who has never done a hard days work and just takes 'charity checks' from the government.

i would like to open up peoples eyes to a different way of life and living to that which they have grown up in....just as mine are continually being opened. The good and the bad. Learning how your fellow beings live helps us to understand them better, and have more compassion.

¡Z! said...

Kikiesque : "I am infinite." << hey. http://bit.ly/mUu8Bb << thinking of you.