Making money off suffering
Mar. 14th, 2008 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unusualmusic_lj_archivePoorism? What Is Inequality Coming To?
Posted by: Sally Kohn , March 12, 2008
Take a trip through the most impoverished regions of the planet! Witness first-hand the poverty that strikes these communities! ... Wait a minute. What does this "tourism" of inequality say about ourselves?
It says something about the extremities of inequality in our world when rich people are now paying money to take tours of poor people. An article by Eric Weiner in the travel section of the Sunday New York Times highlights the growing business of “poorism” --- taking tour groups to visit the world’s slums and shanty towns for a glimpse at just how bad things really are.
Troubling enough is the irony of tourists paying enough money to a tour guide to traipse through a poor family’s home that, if given to that family instead, might actually help them escape from poverty. One excursion cited in the New York Times article charges $7.50 per person to gawk at the Dharavi slums of Mumbai, India. Worldwide, 3 billion people --- nearly half the world’s population --- live on less than two dollars a day, including almost 80% of Indians and, most assuredly, 100% of people living in the Dharavi slums.
It’s not that rich privileged folks seeing poverty first-hand is a bad thing. It’s vital that everyone from titans of industry to those of us privileged enough to have a home and running water understand the true depths of poverty that exist on our planet, in our own backyards and on the other side of the globe. Yet when, day-to-day, the privileged are so removed from the poor that we need tour guides and travel itineraries in order to actually witness what poverty is, it says something about just how extreme inequality has become.
Rest here
Posted by: Sally Kohn , March 12, 2008
Take a trip through the most impoverished regions of the planet! Witness first-hand the poverty that strikes these communities! ... Wait a minute. What does this "tourism" of inequality say about ourselves?
It says something about the extremities of inequality in our world when rich people are now paying money to take tours of poor people. An article by Eric Weiner in the travel section of the Sunday New York Times highlights the growing business of “poorism” --- taking tour groups to visit the world’s slums and shanty towns for a glimpse at just how bad things really are.
Troubling enough is the irony of tourists paying enough money to a tour guide to traipse through a poor family’s home that, if given to that family instead, might actually help them escape from poverty. One excursion cited in the New York Times article charges $7.50 per person to gawk at the Dharavi slums of Mumbai, India. Worldwide, 3 billion people --- nearly half the world’s population --- live on less than two dollars a day, including almost 80% of Indians and, most assuredly, 100% of people living in the Dharavi slums.
It’s not that rich privileged folks seeing poverty first-hand is a bad thing. It’s vital that everyone from titans of industry to those of us privileged enough to have a home and running water understand the true depths of poverty that exist on our planet, in our own backyards and on the other side of the globe. Yet when, day-to-day, the privileged are so removed from the poor that we need tour guides and travel itineraries in order to actually witness what poverty is, it says something about just how extreme inequality has become.
Rest here
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Date: 2008-03-15 06:53 am (UTC)And you're correct in saying that so many of us have no real concept of the poverty that others live in. I remember being completely gobsmacked when I read a statistic that indicated I'm in the top 10% of the world's wealthiest people, simply because I have spare change lying around my house. That really hammers it home, just how poor so many people are.
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Date: 2008-03-15 07:56 am (UTC)If you do the ecological footprint test ion footprint network.org, it really snaps your eyes open. Its totally ridiculous to see the comparison between people in first world countries vs people in third world countries vis a vis how much we exploit the environment.