A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE (Part 13). This blog is a continuation of review of The Creation of World Poverty by Teresa Hayter, published in 1990.
Chapter 2: Extremes of Poverty and Wealth
There is no lack of information on the extreme forms of deprivation which the majority of people in this world now suffer. Most but not all of these people live in Asia, Africa and Latin America. There are, in addition, glaring inequalities in wealth between different parts of the world and also within individual countries. The ‘widening gap’ between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries has become a cliché. There are also a good many indications, less well documented perhaps, that the situation of the very poor, especially in rural areas in underdeveloped countries, is becoming worse in absolute as well as in relative terms, mainly because distribution within countries is becoming more unequal.
16% of the population of the world, received about 63% of its income
According to the World Bank’s 1980 World Development Report, the average annual income per head of 18 industrialized countries in 1950 was $3,841; that of the 38 countries with lowest incomes was $164, or about one twenty-third. In 1980 the estimated average income of the former was $9,684; the income per head of the latter was $245, or barely one fortieth. The 18 industrialized countries include the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan as well as Western Europe. From statistics elsewhere in the World Bank’s Report, it is possible to calculate that in 1979 these countries, with about 16% of the population of the world, received about 63% of its income. The others, which include the ‘low income’ countries and also some ‘middle income’ countries, the oil exporting countries, and what the World Bank calls the ‘centrally planned economies’, thus have 84% of the population and only 37% of the income.
Most people in underdeveloped countries do not have enough to eat
The simple fact is that most people in underdeveloped countries do not have enough to eat. People in the so-called developed countries commonly eat too much; and some live in extreme luxury. The yachts and palaces are not confined to the inhabitants of the First World. Some people in underdeveloped countries are extremely rich. The distribution of income in underdeveloped countries is probably on the whole more unequal than that in the industrialized countries, in which considerable deprivation nevertheless exists, in spite of their overall wealth.
One child in four dies before the age of five
The average adult literacy rate in 1975 in the 18 most industrialized countries was 99%; in the 38 ‘low income’ countries it was estimated to be 38%. Average life expectancy in 1978 was 74 years in the former group and 50 years in the latter. About 800 million people, or almost 40% of the population of the so-called developing countries, who live in ‘absolute poverty’: ‘a condition of life so characterized by malnutrition, illiteracy and disease as to be beneath any reasonable definition of human decency.’ In some countries one child in four dies before the age of five.
Chapter 3: Conventional Explanations for Poverty
Explanations are attempted to show why the peoples of underdeveloped countries are ‘poor’, but the existence of their poverty is not related to the wealth accumulated elsewhere. Attempts to provide historical explanations are dismissed as irrelevant: ‘focusing on questions of historical guilt will not provide answers to the crucial problem of self-responsibility’, says the Brandt Report. The explanations such as they are, tend to be based on what might tactfully be called a Eurocentric view of the world, which is itself a product of historical circumstances, and of colonial mythology in particular.
The ‘natives’ were lazy, stupid, barely human
Europeans, who began by being impressed and indeed overawed by what they found in civilizations sometimes more sophisticated than their own, gradually built up theories of racial superiority. Especially from the 19th century onwards, they felt the need to justify to themselves their domination of colonial peoples, and in particular the institution of slavery. The ‘natives’, they maintained, were lazy, stupid, barely human. An Englishman in 1820 found the cause of Indian poverty ‘in a natural debility of mind, and in an entire aversion to labor’. By the 19th century, says V.G. Kierman in The Lords of Human Kind, “the whiteman had worked himself into a high state of self conceit. White men were willing to justify everything to themselves in the cause of bringing ‘civilization’ to the natives.”