Stuart Buck, inspired by the “When education makes us poorer” post from yesterday, passes along this essay written by Steve Sain, a Christian missionary, who says that we in the West do more damage than we realize by assuming that our ways of measuring wealth and poverty are universally applicable. Excerpt:

When people visit the Waodani, they look around and think, “Wow, these people have nothing!” People from the outside think the Waodani are poor because they don’t have three-bedroom ramblers with wall-to-wall carpeting, double garages so full of stuff the cars never fit and, I guess, because they never take vacations to exotic places like Disney World.

Saint talks about traveling in the US with his Waodani friend Mincaye, who can’t understand why people are happy living as we do.

More:

Mincaye is a rich man. Or, he was until someone taught him to drive a golf cart and he started thinking how much fun it would be to take his 57 grandchildren for rides up and down the Nemompade airstrip where we used to live together. Now he wants his own golf cart (which means he would need a charging station, and a solar panel farm to power it, and a shop to maintain it, and spare parts to keep it running….)

From there Saint makes a provocative and profound point that when we from the West take our own cultural values and technology to these very poor people, we sometimes create for them desires that their very limited economies and societies cannot possibly fulfill. And we also “provoke poverty” by making these people feel that they are poor (because they lack cars, cell phones, etc.) when they hadn’t noticed their lack before:

Among people living simply amidst abundant resources, poverty is not measured in annual income or net worth, but in “what I have in comparison to what those around me have.” In such contexts poverty is more of an attitude and a mood than an actual state of having or not having something. In such contexts, contentment is the secret. Some people think 1 Timothy 6:6 says “Godliness is a means of gain,” but really it says “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” Where there is godliness with contentment there is no perceived “poverty” until discontentment has been stirred.

Read the whole thing.