When I woke up this morning, I was far thirstier than usual. My mouth was dry and my head hurt a little bit. I checked my phone- it was a couple hours earlier than my usual wake up time. I grabbed an empty water bottle, went to my sink, and filled it.
As I drank, a stray thought crossed my mind- this is a miracle. Then I went back to bed.
I never have thoughts like that. I am not sure what prompted it this morning. I suspect my experience living in one of the richest neighborhoods in world history is fairly standard- I usually take it all for granted. The apartment listings around here never say 'this unit has clean, running water'- they all do.
Every once in a while, I'll read a book or hear a story about places where this is not the case. Again, I suspect my reaction is fairly standard- I usually nod soberly. Occasionally, I'll offer an extra comment or two, insight-filled remarks like 'that must be tough' or 'wow...wow'. It's not so much that I don't care, it's more like I just don't know what to do with the information.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers is just the type of work to elicit such reactions. In this National Book Award winner, Katherine Boo describes daily life in Annawadi, a slum tucked into the shadows of Mumbai's newest symbols of prosperity- hotels, luxury buildings, an international airport. Her account explores how the residents of this settlement navigate extreme poverty while being actively left behind by a rapidly changing modern world.
One of my earliest posts for this blog included a quote from Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Here is a shortened version of that quote:
‘At Annawadi…the slum dwellers rarely got mad together…Powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked…they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people…Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional…’When I first read this book, I thought I took nothing from the experience. I barely wrote down a single original thought- all I did was copy that quote! The stories about kids wading into the sewage lake to find salvageable trash worth pennies were moving and stirring and soul-crushing and all that- but again, what was I going to do with that information?
But in the years since, I've noticed this quote popping into my head. I suppose this is unexpected if the quote is considered literally- I do not encounter extreme poverty so why would this quote ever come to mind? And yet, the quote comes to mind whenever I see the basic premise of the powerless blaming each other playing out in examples from my own life. In fact, it turns out that the idea of 'powerless individuals' extends fairly easily into my life here in the USA.
Relatively speaking, there is always someone I can identify as 'poor' in the sense of being the least well-off within any group of people. Whenever I witness someone act out of character- especially when competing for a trivial gain won at another's expense- I usually discover an underlying sense of powerlessness driving the act. At this point, I've seen it so often that I assume it to be the case by default.
Maybe the surest way to extend and apply the quote is through the idea of lack. When a person or a group lacks something, the feeling of powerlessness manifests in a ferocious, desperate, and deletrious competition. It makes sense. If I needed to pick a fight that I could not lose, I would pick out the weakest possible opponent. And when a need is on the line, losing is not an option. Even returning to fight another day is sometimes unrealistic depending on how soon the need must be met.
This insight about competition, I think, brings me back to the original question I had when I first read this book. What am I supposed to do with this information? Years after the fact, interpreting the book as a story about how powerless people behave instead of its literal reading as a portrait of a specific location on the planet was the key. From there, I saw examples in my own life of competition gone wrong and started thinking about present-day problems through the lens of whether competition was the appropriate solution.
In general, it seems that competition which fails to account for the losers leads to problems down the line. Before the government insured bank deposits, fears that a bank might go bust (put another way: lose in its competition against other banks) could lead to bank runs that ironically might cause the bank to go bust. And armchair historians enjoy citing the punishment of Germany after WWI as a factor in the start of WWII (an example that fits though is perhaps a tad over-dramatic).
Those who cannot get health insurance in this country are the losers in a competition for health insurance. The reasons vary- job loss, physical condition, legal status, individual choice- but the end result is the same. How do we account for them? Right now, the talk suggests the trend is going in the opposite direction. Some of the proposals will account even less for the 'losers' than current legislation does.
Even with no changes, the status quo raises premiums for all insurance holders by subsidizing the tab the government picks up when the uninsured receive care. The strange thing about that outcome is how it undermines the stated benefit, (and thus purpose) of competition- to lower costs.
The other general insight I've had about competition is how a fight to increase share of a fixed pie tends to cause problems that fights to increase the overall size of the pie seem to somehow avoid. This came to mind when I read this article about fire trucks that watched a house burn down over an unpaid 'fire coverage' fee.
Forget all the high-minded and idealistic talk about treating your neighbors right and such- the policy fails at an economic level. In squabbling over $75, the city and county probably cost themselves an uncountable sum in future tax revenue from whoever chose to live or consume elsewhere based on that one story alone.
As Boo remarks about the citizens of Annawadi, the poor squabble for provisional gains. A government that chooses to compete with its citizens for trivial gains rather than finding ways to work together must be a poor government by some measure. It certainly is going to become one, I think, because people flee from the governments that compete against rather than cooperate with them.
On the other hand, a government that looks out for its people is surely destined for a better tomorrow. The surest way to create wealth is to harness the creativity and energy of a person. A government cultivates these conditions by motivating its people to work together and share gains rather than compete against each other for slices of what is fixed in place.
An individual who competes for a bigger slice of the pie must be a poor individual by some measure. But again, the inverse points to a promising path for us all- the wealthy person finds ways to cooperate through building wealth that can be shared.
Drawing this lesson from Boo's work strikes me as somewhat selfish. But it answers the question I used to struggle with- what am I going to do with this information? At the simple level, it means sharing the information through book recommendations or blog posts. It requires that I participate in the city, state, and country in a way that encourages cooperation in the best way I can.
The more challenging applications demand that I be generous with my attention, cooperation, and resources. That requires the patience to wait for the fruit to ripen. It means fighting the temptation to squabble for petty or trivial gains in any sense of the expression. If I manage to exclude impoverishing behaviors from my life, by default what remains will only be what enriches me.
