I lived in the same country. I used the same currency. I spoke the same language. Yet my life was not like that of civilians I knew and their underlying assumptions and mine that informed our decisions just did not match up to such a degree that I eventually stopped trying to explain my life choices even to people quite close to me who simply did not get the context and that their decision-making matrix and mine were largely unrelated.
I wish you luck in trying to figure out how to do this.
To explain poverty to a middle class Californian, frame it in culture terms that are familiar, but which still reach the same class of emotional experience you want them to understand.
e.g.
Have you ever gone shopping at The Gap for jeans with a bunch of pals, and they take forever to decide which 12 pairs of jeans they're going to get, but you only take like 20 minutes because you can only afford 4 pairs? You know how that feels?
They'll catch on.
She was probably just worried sick about me because the stats for civilian Americans is abysmal. I think it's something like one third of men don't pay at all and one third only make partial payments, which routinely leaves women and their children in a real pickle. It can take months or years to get legal remedy, garnish his wages and get back payments -- if you get them at all.
But it doesn't work that way in the military. If he had stiffed me, I would have written his commanding officer and his wages would have been garnished post haste, much more quickly than what you typically see in the civilian world.
My friend apparently thought I was some naive little ninny who just didn't understand the cold, cruel world because I had such a sheltered existence as a homemaker. And that wasn't it at all. The rules were just different for me and I was in no danger of being left out in the cold like she was likely imagining was about to happen to me given how common that is in the civilian version of America.
The landlords quit their shit and cut a deal.
If you were a military spouse, you may have had a job, but rarely a career. You move at the whim of your spouse's job (every few years) to places you don't control. You generally don't get to pick your neighbors or even your friends - you just adapt to the situation that constantly changes.
Spouses of military members that go on unaccompanied tours have it even worse. They are at home alone, often for months at a time. My anecdotal observations of Navy spouses, for example, was that cheating was a standard practice - not because the marriage was necessarily bad, but because they were so lonely. This is based on limited exposure (I was Air Force, both as a brat and active duty), so may not be as universally true as I observed.
This can all sound horrible, but it really wasn't. Just different. Different enough that sometimes it is hard to explain.
It has its own government-run housing authority, its own government-run medical system, you don't always know where you will end up on your next tour, you may not be allowed to quit and leave the military when you would normally expect to under some circumstances, etc.
Perfect description, which I find hilarious. It's the best large-scale example of socialism that actually works. But the Right won't admit it and the Left thinks it's hell.
So superficial analyses may just not be very recognizable to the population, because of very different value systems and nuances.
I guess it's something that's as ingrained in the Indian psyche as turmeric is in Indian cuisine.
Were it necessary to cover the subtle nuances of Eastern and Western culture, it would be hard to get anywhere with prose. I think it's sufficient to convey enough information to demonstrate that the value systems and lived experiences are fundamentally different.
The goal is not to "level the playing field" in terms of where people are coming from, but to foster more meaningful discussions by explicitly taking context into account.
Prose is what's needed to communicate effectively. Tables and charts simply can't do that by themselves. Even they need a legend and labels to be useful.
I think that's just it: trying to promote better cross cultural understanding. That's something I tried with the GP here, but I could probably write up an article to be linked to in such discussions.
> metrics like "How many meals per day do you get?" and "What kind of shelter do you have?"
I think this is a good thought, a focus on qualitative differences in lived experience using quantifiable metrics. With that approach you're less likely to offend rather than inform. Might be best to skip the "less than 1/2 of one percent of Americans were poor by standards in India" since it seems to suggest that American poverty isn't "real" poverty.
I would even go so far as to say that communicating the cultural context is far more important than underlining the economics, the former of which TFA is attempting to do.