As one of the biggest shopping day of the year dawns, we look out the window and -- to quote the archetypal priest -- we think of those less fortunate. No, dear Reader, we don't mean those who couldn't buy their family a new plasma TV. We refer to those in the world are inconceivably poor: they cannot even afford proper nourishment.
For example, take Haiti. 80% of Haitians live on $2 or less a day -- making them part of the 2.4 billion or so who live on the same budget. Mind you, Reader, than isn't $2 for food a day, that's just $2 a day. They are so poor they are eating baked mud, potentially ingesting various toxins or parasites. This mud they eat is euphemistically referred to as a cookie.
Mmmm, cookies.
We have no ethical axe to grind, one way or the other. We merely feel greatly irked at people who worry when they cannot blow large amounts of money on the holidaze. For instance, a worker at a recently-reopened cookie manufacturer in Ohio said, after getting a $1,500 gift card, 'I can give my kids a Christmas.'
Really? No kidding. We can see a couple ounces of gold dancing in our eyes if someone handed us $1,500. A person in Haiti would have probably screamed for joy, since they could then have eaten on $5 a day for about a year... but this person instead saw Wal-Mart, or possibly Toys-R-Us.
No one in the West quite understands what it truly means to be poor. We certainly don't, and we don't want to, either. The poor of Haiti have little-to-no hope of improving their financial situation, because they cannot even afford to live hand-to-mouth. In the West, one still has the potential to improve one's finances, even in this Depression. If one gets a windfall, like the worker and her $1,500, one must think long and hard about spending it wisely. Use it for a lasting improvement in one's living conditions: pay down debt; shore up investments; buy some precious metals. To fritter away a windfall, time and time again, launches one on the road to perfect understanding of just how poor the average Haitian really is.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
4 comments:
I couldn't agree more. By the way, I often notice it is hard to post on your site with my new Apple computer and Safari browser. You demand a password to post and the image for the password often comes up as a question mark. I am not sure how I got past it if I did at all this time.
Oh, and things are getting better... Fractal software is clearly showing this http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
Your Apple is probably getting confused by the pop up for the word verification. This is a Blogger issue as far as we can tell.
Thai:
I watched Mr. Rosling's lecture, and it was interesting. I would very much like to see his raw presentation. There are some problems which I immediately noticed, however:
He tried to form correlations between graphs of different logarithmic scales, which is patently spurious. For instance, his comparison between the GDP graph and the internet user graph, in which he said there was a semblance between the two. As far as I can tell, he futzed with the logarithmic scale to make the graphs look similar.
I didn't notice whether or not he mentioned if he adjusted his dollar amounts for inflation. If he didn't, that's a serious hole in his theory. If he did, it's all well and good that more people have a bit more money, but how does that compare to the cost of goods?
All in all, I found his presentation interesting, but I cannot say I found it convincing. I will try and find a copy of his data. In the end, though, I have to agree with a comment on the page: there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Post a Comment