How did it happen that India increased its per capita GDP 4x since independence, and still a lot of people face hunger? It just means many people simply failed to take any action for generations.
Besides you can give every reason under the sun why working hard may not yield to results. Or you can try working hard and see for the results yourself. There will be failures, misfires and hits off target. But with a little trying eventually a person will make it.
> "Besides you can give every reason under the sun why working hard may not yield to results. Or you can try working hard and see for the results yourself."
Again, an empty statement unless accompanied by specifics. It's easy to ask "why don't these people just try hard work?", but the specifics get, naturally, much more complicated.
- What is the realism behind expecting hard, industrious work from a demographic of people who can't even reach caloric break-even each day? How realistic is it to expect severely malnourished and starving people to bootstrap themselves? This strikes me like finding a person who's been stuck at the bottom of a well for days, tossing a rope ladder down, and wondering why they're not climbing. The answer is simple: they have passed the threshold where they can help themselves, but they are not yet past the threshold where they cannot be helped by an outside force.
> "There will be failures, misfires and hits off target."
The consequences of which is quite severe. When we try something and fail, our feelings get hurt, we might lose some money, and maybe we get to pull our belts in a bit tighter for a while.
When the already starving fail, they die. I don't think it's extreme to say that we shouldn't experiment with social policy on the potential deaths of tens of millions.
And this is actually a salient point - subsidy and direct-aid programs like this are never meant as a permanent solution to anything. Nobody is dumb enough to believe this. These programs buy time to find a systemic solution - because it's better to keep these people hobbling along while we try to fix the larger systemic issues that perpetuate their poverty, than to simply let them all die while we tinker with the knobs and switches.
> "But with a little trying eventually a person will make it."
Reality does not support your argument, even in first-world nations. Despite the stereotypes, the USA is full of industrious, hard-working people who have not made it. The entire world is full of industrious, hard-working people who have not made it.
And this is why I think your argument is typical. In order to reconcile your world view (that enough hard work means success) with reality (the vast, vast majority of the world is unsuccessful), one must make the assumption that those who haven't made it have not worked hard enough.
This is a sadly typical view that's as vindictive as it is false.
Everybody Loves a Good Drought: P. Sainath. There's a haunting picture there of an emaciated man who climbs trees to gather toddy. The most poignant thing about it was that he needs protein since he does hard physical labor. The solution is for him alone to eat a couple of tablespoons of fish everyday (no other member of his family gets to do so).
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich.
This book explains why some poor people have no savings. E.g., they have to live in relatively expensive pay-by-the-day motels instead of apartments since they literally don't have the $500 to put up a month's rent as deposit.
FYI: I have not read this book, but have read reviews of it.
Anyway, the main point here is that lots of poor people with average willpower remain poor because life is just too tough for them. Nobody is saying that it is impossible for a poor person with above-average willpower to become rich.
There is no prejudice against the middle-class person with average willpower who remains middle-class. Why should we shower contempt on the poor who possess only average willpower?
My main point here is that upper-middle-class people who go as far as Ehrenreich to argue that you just plain need an upper-middle-class income to get by are revealing more about their level of decadence than about the plight of the actual working poor. At best it's well-intentioned but patronizing--at worst it's just plain cynical.
Again, an explanation that made sense to me. At the extreme low end (using the analogy of quantum mechanical effects), effects of the lack of money will be different than the effects at a higher income level.
Just speaking for myself: if I had only $40 at the end of the night, I would check into a motel rather than go to a homeless shelter. AFAIK, there aren't an abundance of homeless shelters either, and they are populated by literally mentally ill people and I would be afraid for my safety. Not to mention the question of losing ones dignity by going to a homeless shelter. YMMV.
See also the "30 Days" episode on living on a minimum wage in America: http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70129649
This is one of the most stereotypical fallbacks of those who have "made it". It leads naturally to the conclusion that those who are weak are so out of their own accord, which is a laughably false statement.
It is not a position that is hard to understand - assigning moral blame to those less fortunate can be a defense mechanism against the hopeless and helpless injustice we see everywhere.
> "What helped me rise is self esteem to never accept help and learn to be strong instead."
This is nice rhetoric and a feel-good platitude, no better than believing in "the power of the self" or such motivational-speaker BS.
A hallmark of meaningless rhetoric is an inability to generate specificity. I've noticed in your other posts in this thread that this is the case. There are a lot of technically true, but ultimately useless statements.
Examples:
> "If we help boost agriculture productivity and work on our economy most people will be able to buy food."
How? I think we can all agree that if the economy was booming these people would have work and be able to buy food at fair market value - but you make it sound like "working on our economy" is trivial, or even possible in the short term. Along your logic, if we can just perfect cold fusion and supply free energy to everyone poverty would cease to exist! The devil, as usual, is in the details.
> "This indicates they are not earning enough. So fixing that makes more sense than fixing problems in the free food program."
Again, you're technically correct, but you've conveniently missed the how. The Income Problem is the most fundamentally difficult problem facing governments of our era, particularly in poor countries like India. So unless you have some groundbreaking insight into how this can happen, the statement is empty.