THE MODERNIZATION OF POVERTY

Households living in extreme poverty are mostly found in Africa. But the largest number of poor households live in Asia. That’s broadly speaking the difference among the two hundred million poor households. 

The resemblance is that nowadays most of the poorest households are no longer self-sufficiently living of their limited pieces of land or small number of cattle. Nor are they anymore oppressed and exploited in direct, personal relationships with owners of more land or cattle but at least kept alive to provide labor for the lord. 

The poor of today are increasingly dependent on markets - markets at the local, national or international levels. By working for others at low wages the poor income earners participate in the labor market. By spending their small amounts of earned money on food items and medicines they participate in the consumer market.

Their income depends on the days or hours they find employment and the wages they receive for their work. The relation between that income and the prices of goods they buy is their purchasing power. This purchasing power decides on their level of welfare.

But while at the different markets the fluctuations in supply, demand and prices are influenced by the power centers of New York and Washington, Beijing and Tokyo, London and Paris, Riyadh and Moscow, Delhi and Singapore, the poor have hardly any say in such fluctuations. The outcome is that many of those poor see their money income grow less than the prices of goods they buy and that, so, their purchasing power decreases.

This massive misfortune happens in silence, far away from the distracting spectacles presented by the media and with very few local persons to be targeted as directly responsible: the modernization of poverty.

See also: Werff, P.E. van der (1992). Modern Poverty: The Culture of Distribution and Structural Unemployment in the Foothills of Kerala. ISBN 8185425612. Delhi: Manohar Publications, pp. 212