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Wealth and Poverty in Paradise

How much does the experience of freedom mitigate the material deficits of relative poverty?
Dominica-copy

Apropos of some of the discussion happening on this site about the nature of poverty, and at the risk of sounding horrifically upper-middle-SWPL-whatever, I wanted to relate some thoughts about a recent visit I made to the island of Dominica.

Dominica is a very small country. They have only 70,000 people, and though the country is physically tiny it is not especially dense. (96 people per square kilometer, versus 349 for neighboring Martinique, 300 for Grenada, 258 for Trinidad and Tobago.) It’s not a deeply impoverished country – on a purchasing power parity basis, per capita GDP is up there with Romania and Venezuela, and three times the level of the Philippines. But it is far from wealthy. And in the rural southeast, where we were, people live very simply; in rural areas, every other household is impoverished, according to the UNDP.

It’s hard to get ahead in Dominica. The country is very mountainous – it’s quite young, geologically, and still volcanically active – and its poor system of roads mostly go straight up and down with the gradient of the mountains. It takes a long time to get anywhere, and there are few expanses of flat land suitable for large-scale agriculture. And because it’s a small island, imported goods are relatively expensive – and a lot of different kinds of goods need to be imported. Combined with the limited amount of local capital, what you have is a formula for under-development. It’s just very hard to see what Dominica could produce that would integrate readily into the global supply chain.

Wisely, I suspect, the government is not trying to encourage industrialization, and is trying to move away from agricultural products (mostly bananas) that have a hard time competing with industrial-scale operations elsewhere anyway. It’s focused on eco-tourism and on specialized services a small island could plausibly provide: a cheap medical education (import medical students, export doctors), and the kinds of financial services that cluster around tax havens. All of which seems to be working reasonably well, but none of which is going to provide a rapid rise in living standards in the countryside.

But the thing is: this impoverished countryside looks quite healthy. People walk everywhere; they have no choice but to stay fit. Life expectancy at birth is 76.5 years, comparable to Poland and Uruguay. Food grows everywhere, free for the taking, and fresh water is abundant; the island is quite edenic in that regard. It’s never cold. As one of our guides told us repeatedly, even if you don’t have two nickels to rub together, you’ll never die of hunger or thirst on the island.

Moreover, precisely because the island isn’t suited for massive luxury development, there was less of a sense than in some parts of the Caribbean of a steep power gradient between tourists and locals. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we felt like guests rather than tourists, but the master-servant dynamic that kicks in easily in such situations was far more attenuated than usual.

We tend to think of wealth as luxury – having lots of stuff – and poverty as the lack. But that may not be the best way of thinking about it, at least once we’re talking about people above the subsistence level. Absolute poverty and its ills – starvation, malnutrition, etc. – are still rampant in parts of the world, and even in pockets of the developed world, and deserve serious attention. But once we get above that level, measuring poverty just in terms of income or in terms of goods becomes more problematic. Agatha Christie once wrote that she never thought she would be so rich as to be able to afford a car, nor so poor that she could not afford servants. What constitutes a lot of valuable “stuff” is always relative, both to the standards of the time and to what the Joneses have.

Perhaps a better way of thinking about poverty above subsistence is in terms of the experience of freedom. Someone who is literally imprisoned is living a deeply impoverished life even if they have three squares a day. Someone who cannot afford not to work 16 hours a day is also impoverished – even if they treat as necessities some consumer goods (a cell phone, say) that previous generations would have considered unimaginable luxuries. Ditto for someone whose prospects and opportunities are so narrowly circumscribed that they feel no choice in their future. In the ancient world, someone who could not afford to feed himself might sell himself into slavery; in the 17th and 18th centuries, he might bind himself to indentured servitude. How different are the “choices” many of the world’s poor make today, particularly the ones lucky enough to be integrated into the global supply chain?

How does Dominica fare from that perspective? The barriers to self-improvement are, as noted, quite steep; that’s one reason the island has had a perpetually high emigration rate. If one of our guides touted the fact that it was impossible to starve, another guide – who had lived in America – complained of the island’s provincialism, and missed both the consumer paradise of America and the opportunity America afforded him to make a living doing something he wanted to do (tinkering with cars, as it happened), instead of having to fit into one of the few roles available on the island. Unemployment is very high among Dominica’s poor; there are clearly many who don’t have the choice to do much of anything.

But it is possible merely to live quite freely in Dominica, free of many of the fears that stalk the poor of wealthier countries. That’s not a quality to ignore when we think about poverty.

I’m not discounting the seriousness and importance of absolute levels of poverty. Nor am I dignifying the notion of someone earning $150,000 per year being “house-poor” because they bought a brownstone in Clinton Hill for $2,000,000. The latter is a real thing, but it is not poverty; it’s a conscious (possibly wise, possibly foolish) choice to spend a lot of money on one consumer good-slash-investment, leaving much less for other goods and investments.

All I’m saying is that the frame that defines poverty as having relatively less stuff than most people is, itself, impoverished. And that a richer definition would focus on how we live, and how much choice in how we live, and not just on what we have.

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