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A wonderful story in a wonderful
article by Doug Saunders in the Globe and Mail this morning.
How coming out of poverty creates awareness of insurmountable
inequality.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/poverty-gives-way-to-inequality-and-the-great-frustration/article4625291/
Former Chilean president Ricardo
Lagos recently told me a story to explain why he, like a
growing number of political leaders, has stopped viewing
poverty as his primary problem.
The story involved a poor village
in the foothills of the Andes. When Mr. Lagos was education
minister in the early 1990s, he built its first school. Later
in the decade, as minister of public works, he built the first
modern road to the village. Then as president after 2000, his
programs delivered the village’s first supplies of clean
water, agricultural irrigation and electricity.
And then the presidential election
came around. Mr. Lagos campaigned hard in the village he had
so dramatically transformed, reminding voters that he had
ended poverty there within a decade.
“My opponent? I am not sure he knew
where that village was,” Mr. Lagos said. “But he got 60 per
cent of the vote there, and I got 40 per cent. Why? After we
gave them so many things? Well, what the villagers told me was
that those things had made them less poor, but also gave them
more stress and made them less happy.”
Water and electricity meant there
were now bills to pay, and expensive TVs on which to watch the
inaccessible lives of the country’s upper-middle class. With
roads came car payments and trips to the city, and the growing
discovery of just how poor these newly middle-class villagers
really were – and how impossible it would be to bridge that
gap.
This is key, if we can leave people to their own
development, which means that a few outliers will go out, and
bring back, over a generation the new ideas and new things,
allowing the generational development to occur, then everyone
is better off with gradual hybridization, not radical
hybridization like the person you describe did...
The issue with poverty is not in the villages, it is with the
people who leave that structure, who go to the city where
there is no structure, only poverty waiting, but a kind of
"hybrid poverty" that is dastardly in its nature and hard on
people because of the increase in poor children with nothing
to do...
Then u get all kinds of issues, those are the ones we are
dealing with. |
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Action Step: As to people being utility driven
(like your chilean)...people in poverty are NOT utility
driven, duh... Utility motivation is enscounced in achievers!
so, from a motive standpoint, he's barking up the wrong tree,
thinking quid pro quo, fyi... Achievement motivation, and even
affiliative motivation doesn't work, using avoidance and power
is key when you deal with the poverty issues and breaking the
cycle of poverty, where power is in the structure, and
avoidance is in the reasoning for poverty and it's hold in a
structure. |
