Poverty Kills (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

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2021-07-13 10:00:06

Bangladesh, 1974. Food per person was at an all-time high — it was a peak year in rice output and availability. It was also a peak year for starvation. 100,000 people starved to death, their skin cracking and their tissues breaking down. They were unable even to focus their eyes as the world watched on TV. Another million and a half died from starvation’s secondary effects. Another half-a-million died after the famine was over because their bodies had been made so weak. There was plenty of food to feed them. They starved because they were too poor to afford it.

Poor people die because they can’t get food, because they can’t get shelter, because they can’t get health care, because they can’t get homes in places that aren’t polluted, because they can’t get food without toxins, because they can’t get time off to supervise their kids, because they can’t spend money on safety, because they can’t spend money on education, because they can’t get a vacation from the stress that’s literally eating away at their brain. We don’t even know all the reasons poor people die. But we do know that they do.

It’s not polite to talk about that. We talk about the poverty rate or the poverty level or the poverty gap, not kids catching on fire and adults wasting away. We talk about economic development and markets and education, not the millions who die each year coughing blood as tuberculosis takes over their body. (They don’t die from tuberculosis. They die because they can’t afford the vaccine.)

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