“Poorism”
posted by Frank Pasquale
What happens when global inequality becomes extreme enough to be exotic? One result is “poorism,” which brings residents of the developed world to visit slums, favelas, and shantytowns as tourists. Eric Weiner explores the ethical dilemmas:
From the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg to the garbage dumps of Mexico, tourists are forsaking, at least for a while, beaches and museums for crowded, dirty — and in many ways surprising — slums.
David Fennell, a professor of tourism and environment at Brock University in Ontario [says it] is just another example of tourism’s finding a new niche to exploit. The real purpose, he believes, is to make Westerners feel better about their station in life. “It affirms in my mind how lucky I am — or how unlucky they are,” he said.
Not so fast, proponents of slum tourism say. Ignoring poverty won’t make it go away. “Tourism is one of the few ways that you or I are ever going to understand what poverty means,” said Harold Goodwin, director of the International Center for Responsible Tourism in Leeds, England. “To just kind of turn a blind eye and pretend the poverty doesn’t exist seems to me a very denial of our humanity.”
While the feel-good side of tourism is usefully satirized in Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, I’m in favor of this type of travel in general. Spending 10 weeks in Lima, Peru the summer after my first year of law school fundamentally changed my view of the world. It’s very difficult to have a sense of what living on a dollar a day is like unless one has actually seen a shantytown in person. It certainly helps one understand why “contributing to widening divide between rich and poor” is one of the social sins recently highlighted by the Vatican.
March 11, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality
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Responses (6)
Sigivald - March 11, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Why is a widening gap bad?
What would be bad is keeping the poor poor, not becoming richer without harming them (or, indeed, through free trade, enriching all participants).
At the local, personal level – as long as Bill Gates and the like become richer, there’s a “widening gap” between their wealth and mine. This, however, does not harm me in the slightest, and in fact their wealth indirectly benefits me (and everyone else).
Wealth is not zero-sum, and a gap means nothing, morally.
(The Vatican’s strong point has never been economic understanding, of course. I’m unclear how any theology untainted by received Marxism or its equivalents could, given modern economic understanding, confuse wealth and sinful greed.
One would have hoped that they’d have outgrown Mercantilist assumptions (as the Bible is silent on economic theory, they have no theological requirement to stick to false economic doctrines).
One would sadly be mistaken, and the result of following such prescriptions tends to improverish everyone. Which makes for a smaller “gap” between rich and poor without helping the poor’s standard of living in the slightest.)
KipEsquire - March 11, 2008 at 2:18 pm
As someone who less than a year ago sipped chica in an unsanitary hovel (“try not to trip over the chickens”) outside Ollantaytambo, Peru, I concur wholeheartedly that those in wealthy nations should tour poor countries to learn about their conditions.
But “learn about their conditions” also means “learn about what causes those conditions” — which invariably includes some combination of corrupt governments, lack of property rights and other individual liberties, and stagnant socialist institutions (or, just as bad, crony capitalism — which is of course not real capitalism).
See generally, “Hernando de Soto.”
Frank - March 11, 2008 at 2:24 pm
I think that some of de Soto’s work is very good. The work I did there was connected to Indecopi, which was working in parallel with (what I think was called) Cofopri, a land-titling agency.
But there is a contrary position expressed here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2112792/
“De Soto is right to point out the importance of legally sorting out who owns what in the Third World. Secure property rights probably are indeed, as he puts it, the “hidden architecture” of modern economies—or something like that, anyway. On the level of gee-whiz metaphors and moving rhetoric, de Soto deserves a lot of credit: He’s brought an unprecedented degree of attention and funding to the vital and fascinating issue of squatters and informal economies. But he has botched the details, especially by pushing one solution—individual property titles—for all different kinds of poor people in all different kinds of poor places.”
“From the field, the verdicts are rolling in: In some corners of the world, the land-titling programs inspired by de Soto’s work are proving merely ineffective. In other places, they are showing themselves to be downright harmful to the poor people they set out to help.”
Patrick S. O'Donnell - March 11, 2008 at 2:46 pm
I suspect some readers might benefit from an acquaintance with at least a few of the works in my bibliography for the “ethics, economics, and politics of global distributive justice.” Should anyone be interested, I’ll send it along upon request. Not a few of the works (by Amartya Sen, for instance) explain how deeply and cruelly mistaken is the claim that “a [widening] gap [between the rich and poor] means nothing, morally.”
Kevin Outterson - March 11, 2008 at 5:36 pm
If you read the comments after the NYT article, many are favorable, but quite a number seem to think it exploitive in all circumstances. I had similar hesitations too, but was impressed by the people of Rocinha favela and the Mazatlan garbage dump.
But we should come to serve rather than be served.
Which is my primary problem with the critics: why is it fine to visit Rio or Mazatlan and be served by the poor, but to never see the reality of how they live?
Maryland Conservatarian - March 14, 2008 at 12:40 pm
…instinctively I gotta believe that actually spending money amongst the poor has to be better for those poor than getting paid hundreds of thousands at some hedge fund attempting to learn about poverty so as to better help the poor.
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