tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post6120881221462326087..comments2024-03-29T03:19:09.227-04:00Comments on The Philosopher's Stone: GLEANINGS FROM THE MORNING NEWSPAPERRobert Paul Wolffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-47329814078156615672017-07-03T16:49:36.315-04:002017-07-03T16:49:36.315-04:00And $1.90 doesn't buy you much.
In Santiago (...And $1.90 doesn't buy you much.<br /><br />In Santiago (Chile) bus fare is around a dollar, much less than in New York City, I know, but out of the reach of someone who is extremely poor if they also want to eat. <br /><br />From recent news I learned that renting a bed (not a room) in what used to be called a "flophouse" is about 150 dollars a month or more. With $1.90 a day you can't do that and you sleep in the street.<br />s. wallersteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17448905469871566228noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-65281870973080681312017-07-03T14:21:43.217-04:002017-07-03T14:21:43.217-04:00Before celebrating too much about the decline of e...Before celebrating <i>too</i> much about the decline of extreme poverty, some things should be noted.<br /><br />I followed Kristof's link (the link on the word "plunging") for his claim that extreme poverty is "plunging below" 10 percent of world pop. today. The link, which goes to a site called ourworldindata.org, contains a chart showing that <i>estimated</i> extreme poverty (below $1.90 a day) for 2015 is 9.6 percent of the world pop. The latest year for which <i>actual</i> figures (themselves of course not nec. perfect) appears to be available, at least at the World Bank site, is 2013, when 10.7% of world pop., or 766,000,000 people, were in extreme poverty as defined by that $1.90 a day line, acc. to the Bank. The point is that extreme poverty is still unacceptably high, and it's concentrated of course in particular countries and parts of the world. <br /><br />Ditto for child mortality, which has gone down significantly since 1990, but as of 2015 an est. 5.9 million children under age 5 still died, the large majority from preventable (and poverty-related) causes. One can do the same glass-half-full-half-empty analysis w/r/t, say, access to clean water. Kristof says 285,000 people each day get access to clean water for the first time. He doesn't say how many children are born each day into families w/ no access to clean water. Without that latter figure, one doesn't have the net figure, which is what should matter.<br /><br />In sum, the global statistics have been improving, but much remains to be done w/r/t extreme poverty and its concomitants (access to clean water, adequate sanitation, employment, health care, housing, education [e.g., number of children worldwide who are in school [as opposed to working full-time or roaming the streets], etc.). LFCnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-48382683549482943452017-07-03T10:53:20.269-04:002017-07-03T10:53:20.269-04:00In a world dominated by the hegemony of the superl... In a world dominated by the hegemony of the superlative, we must learn to stop rendering all judgments, or even mere assessments, in the language of ritualized hierarchical values—what is "Make America Great Again" but a reconfiguration of the devotional rhetoric that adjures us, "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before Me?" We worry a lot about whether the United States is better or worse than other nations at constituing a model for the rest of the world. We seemed to have substituted a sense of our worth as a political entity with our position in the world measurable purely in quantitative terms: aggregate wealth, median income, number of household refrigerators, how many times over we can annihilate sovereign nations with our nuclear arsenal...<br /><br />We have lost the ability, if we ever had it, of looking at ourselves simply as the historically defined sequence of phenomena and behaviors that describe us as a discrete culture. We are who we are, and worthy of scrutiny as much as and no more than a java or a Lapland, an Estonia or Bali. We do seem by virtue simply of the hyper-productivity of our enterprise, our institutions, and our citizenry to have accumulated a superfluity of artifacts to analyze, but these do not accrue to any universal spiritual sense of worth.<br /><br />If we somehow managed to detach our autonomic impulse to judge, to react, to emote from our curiosity about life, we could, perhaps look more dispassionately at ourselves as a people, as well as our role in the current state of civilization of mankind as whole. We do occupy a disproportionate segment of the attention of the rest of world, We are only some three humdred million-odd souls on a planet of seven billion. We must, indeed, do what Kristoff did in his assessment in the improvement of the poverty snapshot of the world's populations. And we can't seem to help to look backward, as well as elsewhere, to make those invidious comparisons that seem always to leave us short—though if one's memory is long enough, and not that long at all, if one encourages the extension of one's span of attention, one can always recall yet another period when things could not possibly get any worse. And even if they do get worse, at least in material ways, the first step to improvement is not necessarily to declare defiantly (without necessarily defining who or what is being defied, unless, in fact, it's ourselves) that we will make things better, even at the expense of making things for the moment worse for somebody else.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14005813360431290983noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-58503494323971908112017-07-02T16:00:38.266-04:002017-07-02T16:00:38.266-04:00I don't know when America did lead the way to ...I don't know when America did lead the way to a better world except in the struggle against fascism during World War 2.<br /><br />Since then, America has not only defended reactionary governments the world over and done its best to overthrow or subvert progressive ones, but also has exported a way of life based on the individual ownership of the automobile (as a symbol of status and virility), which will probably destroy humanity as we know it through global warming. Through its unofficial propaganda center in Hollywood America has inculcated values having to do with guns and violence and with social status based on fast cars and big houses.<br /><br />As you note, American universities are good and since World War 2, the American counter-culture has produced great stuff, jazz, poets like Allan Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, a life-style based on ecological living and the rejection of the normal road to status, etc.<br />The movements which have come from below, the Black Liberation Movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, have all been positive, but none of them arose from official America, which as far as I can see, has been pernicious.s. wallersteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17448905469871566228noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-47894393610618102822017-07-02T15:29:30.132-04:002017-07-02T15:29:30.132-04:00The Trump show has to say the least torpedoed my m...The Trump show has to say the least torpedoed my mood too and made me bearish on America: clarify for me, is Trump a random event a wild beast terrorizing us or is he some kind of grim reaper of the God of history?<br />Is there any way up or out or is this the end?<br />I am happy to hear that this isn't the end of the world if it's the end of America as we know ithowie bnoreply@blogger.com