[lbo-talk] Re: Re: Political Cartography: Sweden

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Nov 23 06:42:44 PST 2004


<hari.kumar at sympatico.ca> wrote:


>Many people in India would & do drool at living standards in the USA.
>Tell me, does that make the USA a paradise?

Heavens no. Yeah things are relative.

A few weeks ago, a former NGO worker in Vietnam told me about screening the movie Hoop Dreams for a local audience. To Americans, the characters would be seen as impoverished ghetto-dwellers; to the Vietnamese, they were unimaginably affluent. An American poverty-line income is at the 98th percentile of the world income distribution. But does that mean we shouldn't worry about poverty in the U.S.?

Doug



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