An article in the 3/9 NYT entitled "Slum Visits, Tourism or Voyeurism" caught my eye. Here is the response I submitted to the comments page.
If those who visit slums would go there with a guide who might be able to describe to them how much rent the tenants are paying their landlords, out of how much income, and then what share of that rent gets passed along to the commons in order to provide sanitation, schools, common spaces, public safety, and what percentage of that rent goes into the landlords' pockets and stays there, a useful aha! moment might result.
And then to know the identity of that landlord, and what other property he owns, and how he lives on the rent, which is largely land rent, not rent on the magnificent structures in which the poor life, might also lead the discerning tourist to consider what the causes of poverty might be, and what the causes of wealth concentration might be.
And perhaps such a tourist, troubled by what he or she saw in that foreign environment, might return home inspired to seek out the cause of poverty, and figure out how to eradicate it, starting not in that foreign land, but in their own neighborhood, through tax reform.
Recommended reading for the thoughtful would be Henry George's magnificent book "Progress and Poverty: An inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth ... The Remedy," which inspired several generations of our ancestors. They might seek out a new abridgment entitled "Progress and Poverty: Why there are recessions and poverty amid plenty -- and what to do about it."
In either of those books, they'd learn the underlying cause of poverty in a world where natural increases in population, tremendous advances in technology, and public investment in infrastructure and services all work together to make land more valuable -- and that by permitting the lion's share of that value to be privatized -- whether by individuals, corporations, family and other trusts, insurance companies, pension funds, real estate investment trusts, university endowments -- we set up a machine whose product is great wealth for some and poverty and struggle for most everyone else. (You know what share the lion gets. It isn't 51%; it is 99% or so.)
Or they might say that poverty is oh, so sad, and don't I take great photos? And give generously to a charity which seeks to ease hunger, rather than seek out its cause; or provide some other similar small bandage which is designed not to rock any yachts.
Those who want to know more about these ideas might google "quotable nobels" and "quotable notables." There is a world of information about poverty's cause, and how we can remedy it. (And, by the way, in the process ease some of the forces which despoil the environment, produce urban sprawl, keep wages to a minimum and generally make life difficult for most of our fellow human beings.)
Or you might explore the LVTfan blog.
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