My father is an engineer by profession. Had he had a choice when he was younger, he might\u2019ve become a professor of physics. He might\u2019ve also been a happier man, having chased his vocation and lived a fulfilling career. Instead, in the year 1973, he had risen from poverty to graduate from one of the most prestigious universities (on a scholarship) and pass the rigorous banking examination (for which only a tiny fraction of the half a million applicants a year qualify) \u2013 all to obtain an entry-level position at a bank earning a paltry salary.<\/p>\n
Wages were abysmally low back then, before the country opened its markets and invited the foreign investment boom. It didn\u2019t seem possible, and probably wasn\u2019t, for him to chase a career as an academic. He had to support my grandparents and not just financially. He had to do what my grandmother had taught him to do \u2013 find freedom through economic independence and mobility.<\/p>\n
The economist Amartya Sen believes we have to see individual freedom as a social commitment, as part of any development effort. Without choice, one is not truly free. In a fateful move, my father accepted an overseas scholarship in petroleum engineering, a field he had little interest in. But, at USD 267.67\/month, it was nearly four times the amount he would make at a mentally-atrophying position at a bank.<\/p>\n
And thus began his long career in Big Oil, an industry whose morals, values and prejudices he does not share. I recall stories of how, for years, he ate but once a day to save enough money to send home to my grandparents.<\/p>\n
His lack of choice and sacrifice resulted in the freedom my brother and I have today. It is why I am able to fulfill my dream of a career in social justice, rather than have needed to take the first opportunity that presented itself to me. My parents benefited from globalisation and the neoliberal paradigm. But if you ask them, if you look in their eyes when they speak of their childhood, it\u2019s clear that India was home, and was always meant to remain so. My father had no intention of leaving his country, and only did so out of necessity.<\/p>\n
The corporate culture of his industry, rife with bigotry and chauvinism, has done little for him.\u00a0\u00a0 Accountability stops with their shareholders. As Rose Schneiderman succinctly put it during the Massachusetts textile strike of 1912, \u201cThe worker must have bread, but she must have roses too,\u201d appealing for both fair wages and dignity.<\/p>\n
Indeed, it appears workers all over the world are continually fighting for marginal economic advances. Much coverage, for example, has been given to the state of the U.S. economy since the Global Financial Crash, which hit the nation in 2007. Pundits report gleefully that over 200,000 jobs were created in a month this year in the United States. With work comes prosperity \u2013 or so we always thought. Behind the shiny fa\u00e7ade of this headline is the grim truth that many of the Americans nestled inside that figure are working for just above minimum wage (unequivocally not a living wage in the U.S.) at less than $8 an hour. Many work two jobs. Many don\u2019t receive benefits such as healthcare, as companies are not required to provide it to those working casually or part-time. <\/p>\n
Neoliberalism operates under the false promise that maximizing financial returns to their shareholders will maximize the wellbeing of all. General Electric recently made hundreds of employees redundant at its most successful branch in Seattle, Washington, in favour of moving the jobs to Texas. There, no trade unions exist, and thus wages can be substantially lower. Their global profit margins already exceed 19%. It\u2019s a turbulent economy, with unstable, part-time and transitory work being counted as gainful employment.<\/p>\n
In Australia, meanwhile, unemployment hovers at a credible 5-6%. However, the statistic masks the 105,000 homeless who lack the support to get through whatever pitfalls they have endured, including family violence, substance abuse and financial difficulty. Also unaccounted for are those women able to secure a job who have 19% less purchasing power (or simply \u2018power\u2019) due to the gender pay gap, which the Australian Tax Office estimates based on the average taxable income reported for men and women (Irvine, 2016).<\/p>\n
Philosopher Thomas Pogge made an indelible mark on my Panglossian outlook (\u201c\u2026when I grow up, I\u2019ll join the United Nations and eradicate poverty!\u201d) when he argued in Politics as Usual<\/em> that the global injustice of poverty, will remain widespread so long as the wealthy participate in a global governance structure that not only allows it, but needs it: \u201cExisting global institutional arrangements are designed to promote growth not in the global product so much as growth in the affluence of the wealthy elites who dominate international negotiations (Pogge, 2010).\u201d<\/p>\n I am, however, heartened by the rich discourse currently happening around what makes a society happy, recognising that it\u2019s not enough to simply lift people out of material poverty. The debate on the limitations of the predominant commodity-focused perspective\u2014such as measuring developmental progress with indicators such as GDP\u2014gave rise to the recognition that socio-economic development is a complex, multifaceted process. Development scholars and practitioners have repeatedly underlined the fact that poverty alleviation goes well beyond the necessities of material wellbeing. <\/p>\n As the OECD explains, \u201cit measures income, but not equality, it measures growth, but not destruction, and it ignores values like social cohesion and the environment.\u201d This school of thought is influenced by Amartya Sen\u2019s seminal contribution to the discussion of deprivations and capabilities. The cornerstone of the thesis being the argument that human poverty should be considered as the absence of opportunities and choices<\/em> for living a basic human life. But, as David Barkin and Blanca Lemus (2013) caution, \u201cthe academic community seems incapable of defining the concept, because of the difficulty of recognising that it is the very structure of society and the operation of the global market that creates inequality and limits the possibilities for generating opportunities that would allow people to progress.\u201d It is with this that I exhort you, dear reader, that we require a new definition of progress! <\/p>\n Peter Block is an author who writes about the restoration of communities and creating systems that restore our humanity. He writes that, \u201cOur seduction into beliefs in competition, scarcity, and acquisition are producing too many casualties. We need to depart a kingdom that creates isolation, polarized debate, an exhausted planet, and violence that comes with the will to empire\u2026We think the free market ideology that surrounds us is true and inevitable and represents progress.\u201d <\/p>\n Part of my proposed new definition is the acknowledgment that poverty is not the poor\u2019s fault. Firstly, it should be obvious to experts and the proletariat alike that the current world order is designed to create the unpatrolled inequality gaps we are now experiencing. Secondly, studies have shown that chronic stress and uncertainty during childhood, like the kind caused by long-term poverty, can result in epigenetic effects, making stress more difficult to deal with as an adult. There is even evidence that the effects may be inheritable, and it goes a long way to explain why the poor may make poor choices (Cooper, 2017).\u00a0 And thirdly, poverty is a social status \u2013 one ascribed, even imposed, to many people who would not consider themselves so if you asked them. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlin astutely said in 1972 that, \u201cThe world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n All over the world, people are dreaming of a different kind of progress for themselves. In Ecuador, the concept of \u2018good living\u2019 as a translation or adaptation of the expression in Quechua<\/em> and Aymara<\/em>, the languages of descendants of the Incan peoples in the region, has been integrated into the Ecuadorian Constitution. It describes a new form of citizens\u2019 coexistence, in harmony and diversity with nature, in order to achieve a good life, or sumak kawsay<\/em>. As the National Secretary for Planning and Development for Ecuador recently said in an interview, \u201cWe believe that the world does not need development alternatives but alternatives to development. It is necessary to create a completely different world (Ramirez, 2011).\u201d<\/p>\n In Mexico, the Zapatistas have long fought a war against neoliberalism (in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement) and the devastation that it brings. In the last few years, it seems the fight for a peoples\u2019 right to own or control their land and resources against corporations and governments has become the new battleground for human rights. The number of land rights activists killed tripled last year as evidence.<\/p>\n A hotly-debated, much-maligned proposal is to introduce an unconditional, universal basic income (UBI). UBI centres on the idea that the government would pay a flat fee to every adult citizen \u2013 regardless of their engagement in skill-building activities or the paid labour market \u2013 to complement any existing social security and welfare programs. Claudia von Werlhof, a prominent writer and professor of women\u2019s studies in Austria, writes that, \u201cIn the North, thousands of local networks exist in which \u2018\u2018free money\u2019\u2019 replaces money that comes with interest, accumulates value, and serves as a means for speculation rather than trade (Lietaer, 2002). A \u2018\u2018solidarity economy\u2019\u2019 and a \u2018\u2018green economy\u2019\u2019 attempts to expand globally and challenge the prevailing \u2018\u2018profit economy\u2019\u2019 (Milani, 2000). In both the North and the South, people experiment with so-called \u2018\u2018participatory budgets\u2019\u2019 in which the inhabitants of neighborhoods or whole towns decide on how to use tax money. There are also discussions of the concept of an economy of gift-giving in a post-capitalist and post-patriarchal society (Vaughan 2004, 2006).\u201d In any case, she concludes, fundamentally new communal experiences beyond egoism are sought (von Werlhof, 2007).<\/p>\n Von Werlhof elaborates in the manifesto \u201cWomen and the Gift Economy\u201d that capitalism is the last throes of patriarchy.<\/p>\n From the point of view of patriarchy, capitalism is the epoch in which women, nature, and life in general are finally successfully replaced by the artificial products of industry: gifts by exchange; subsistence goods by commodities; local markets by a world market; foreign cultures by western culture; concrete wealth\u2014gifts by money, machinery, and capital\u2014the new abstract wealth; living labour by machines; the brain\/rational thinking by \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d; women by sex-machines and \u201ccyber-sex\u201d; real mothers and\/or their wombs by \u201cmother-machines\u201d; life energy by nuclear energy, chemistry, and bio-industry; and life in general by \u201cartificial life\u201d like genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The only problem that remains today consists in how to \u201creplace\u201d the elements and the globe itself.<\/p>\n (Von Werlhof, 2007).<\/p>\n I entreat us to imagine a radically different worldview, one which speaks about the \u2018economics of compassion\u2019 and a progress that encompasses a fair view to what defines quality of life for all.<\/p>\n Von Werlhof concludes:<\/p>\n We have to establish a new economy and a new technology; a new relationship with nature; a new relationship between men and women that will finally be defined by mutual respect; a new relationship between the generations that reaches even beyond the \u2018\u2018seventh\u2019\u2019; and a new political understanding based on egalitarianism and the acknowledgment of the dignity of each individual.<\/p>\n Had this existed in 1973, the trajectory of my father\u2019s and my family\u2019s life would have been different.\u00a0 Perhaps the wistful look in my parent\u2019s eyes would be too.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n Barkin, D. and Lemus, B. (2013) Understanding Progress: A Heterdox Approach. Sustainability, 5, <\/em>417-431.<\/p>\n Bernard L. (2002). The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work and a Wiser World<\/em>. New York: Century Press.<\/p>\n Cooper, C. (20 April 2017). Why Poverty is Like a Disease. Retrieved from http:\/\/nautil.us\/issue\/47\/consciousness\/why-poverty-is-like-a-disease<\/a><\/p>\n Greenfield, K and Winkler, A. (24 June 2015). The U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s Cultivation of Corporate Personhood. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/politics\/archive\/2015\/06\/raisins-hotels-corporate-personhood-supreme-court\/396773\/<\/a><\/p>\n Irvine, J. (9 June 2016). Australia’s top 10 jobs with the biggest gender pay gap revealed. Retrieved from http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/comment\/australias-top-10-jobs-with-the-biggest-gender-pay-gap-revealed-20160608-gpezg8.html<\/a><\/p>\n Milani, B. (2000). Designing the Green Economy. The Postindustrial Alternative to Corporate Globalization<\/em>: Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield.<\/p>\n Pogge, T. (2010) Politics As Usual.<\/em> Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.<\/p>\n Ramirez, R and Navarrete, R. (2011). Seeds of \u2018Good Living\u2019 In Ecuador? Retrieved from http:\/\/www.newleftproject.org\/index.php\/site\/article_comments\/good_living_in_rafael_correas_ecuador<\/a><\/p>\n