The only way out is to win a quiz show

Aravind Adiga’s Booker winner White Tiger and Danny Boyle’s Golden-Globe-harvesting film Slumdog Millionaire (based on Indian Diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel Q and A) illustrate a “Shining India” that has long shown up in the statistics of those critical of the Globo-glorifiers. It bears repeating (Thus Passim) that 70-80% of India’s population cannot afford to feed themselves to international minimums, that is 2400 calories of cheap stodge per day, assuming they spend on nothing else.

Yet in the UK we continue to talk about “the poor” as if they live on council estates, and as if all they need is the chance to show how bright they are in order to climb up into our middle class paradise. Meritocracy may imply that the less intelligent ones should stay where they are, but what if they were dulled by malnutrition? The world is not made up of a series of Westminster villages, but being good nationalists, the policy makers and pundits seem reluctant to acknowledge this.

The implication of this is that national governments tend to live in a room full of mirrors, where all that they see is themselves, especially in rich OECD countries. Almost everyone uses the poor to justify their policies and positions in these compassionate days of media-conveyed suffering, yet our policy and political debates do not at all reflect their circumstances. This is a flaw of the Left as well as the Right. The legacy of Marx and the Union movement is that we see emancipation of the poor in terms of workplace rights, yet only around 8% of people in India have formal employment contracts, so this is mostly irrelevant and this is probably the case in most poor countries.

If people cannot feed themselves in the cash economy, as the numbers show, then they have to be feeding themselves in the non-cash economy. How can this be so? Where does food come from if not from shops? That’s because the poor are in the environment. Either an urban one, scavenging the remains and polishing the shoes of those visible to us, or a rural one, growing or gathering food under unpredictable conditions. But since policymaking is largely about economics, and economics largely about the cash economy, and the cash economy about people with purchasing power, and not the environment or the poor, these humans (of whom there are rather a lot) remain largely invisible. But what is the problem with them, and their environment, remaining invisible to policy makers, particularly in the rich world?

It gives us a totally misleading sense of the future. Economists, particularly historically oriented ones, write as if it is the swing of a pendulum that determines economic history.  Presumably this means that after this latest desperate burst of neo-Keynesianism we will turn back to more liberal and less risk-averse approaches once times are good again. But that invisible thing, the environment, is changing, and it will impact on all of us, but mainly on those other invisible things, the poor, so that our whole perception of risk, and thus how to organise ourselves, will have to change. We are not going back to a nice cosey stable world with seemingly unlimited natural resources, and we are not replaying the Industrial Revolution in countries like India, even if our policy makers have been Oxbridge-raised on a diet of social thinkers from the steam-engine age. We can talk about public spending as a way of stabilising things until we are blue in the face, but how do we propose to get money to those really at risk under our undoubtedly changing circumstances?

Via NGOs? Well they are not coping well with spending the fraction of the 0.7% of GDP put to aid budgets efficiently. Via business? Well their track record of behaving well in the absence of strong regulation is not so good. Via governments in poor countries? To quote Aravind Adiga’s lead character in White Tiger, “what a fucking joke.” Survival of the fittest in a world where pro-poor leaders in the poor world, particularly those that interfere with rich world access to natural resources tended to “dissappear” has left a legacy of governance that does not exactly channel funds to the needy as a first priority.

We can perhaps hope that our rich world “Social Mobility” thesis works in poor countries, and the poor can suddenly help themselves. Sadly the post-industrial boom in India seems not to be creating lots of jobs, so the whole 1950′s rich world idea of mechanising agriculture and shunting people into the cities is creating shanti towns rather than a lovely unionised industrial base. Also, it takes rather a lot of planets, at current levels of inequality, to lift the poor out this way.

So we have a big problem that our current policy debates are simply not up to addressing. We don’t know how to think about the dependency of the poor on the environment, or how to support them in the face of environmental change or indeed how, in short, to stabilise the world through the coming times of trouble (Thus Passim). There is the  Keynsian idea of a “Green New Deal”, but this is not a cyclical issue we are facing, actually the problems are likely to grow gradually but inexorably over time, so a short-term spending strategy won’t do it (though long-term rural employment guarantees may help a bit, even if dogged by corruption).  Maybe we in the rich world should look to the artists for answers, because right now, it looks like our wonks are all out of ideas.