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Image Credit: Spencer PlattHere's a tiny question — which might strike you as a little strange, controversial, or foolish: why should rich countries have poor people in them, anyways?
When we take a hard look at the world, a curious fact pops out: rich societies with the least numbers of people living in abject poverty do better. Today, such countries are in Northern Europe, the core of Europe, and Canada. What's interesting about them? Well, having less poverty seems to have spectacular benefits. They are more stable, resilient, and prosperous. They are more robust democratically. They are happier and kinder. They are saner, wiser, and healthier. They are better off in every single way imaginable compared to rich societies with more poverty.
What are those societies like? Well, rich societies with more people living in poverty do not just worse, but spectacularly, enduringly worse, in nearly every way imaginable. They end up like America or Russia. They do not really stay democracies, but become authoritarian oligarchies. Lives are shorter and harder and meaner and unhappier. Norms and institutions reward anger, greed, cruelty, spite, and rage, so they end up emptied of of reason, truth, courage, insight, and wisdom. Their economies end up dominated by misinformation, manipulation, bailouts, and predation. The result is that they are much, much more fragile, unstable, precarious, and just plain toxic to be than rich countries with less poverty — everyone is worse off, in the end.
All of which leads me to my second question. Is reducing poverty the single simple secret to building a successful society — the key to escaping decline? Let me put that in perspective. "A successful society needs to be a techno-utopia! Supersonic trains and robo-teachers!", says one side. "No!", cries, another, "it's about deficits!!" How do we build societies that don't end in catastrophic decline, like America, anyways? Can we? It's not sci-fi, because, Canada, Sweden, and Germany did so.
Reality says: maybe, just maybe, it's a lot simpler — and yet more difficult — to escape decline we think it is. If societies with less poor people in them are better off in nearly every imaginable way — then isn't the elimination of poverty probably the very first thing a society should try and do? The one thing with the greatest effect, that it should focus on getting done before anything else, whether cutting taxes or building Facebooks or sending billionaires to Mars?
So. Let me ask again. Why should rich countries have poor people, anyways? Maybe they shouldn't.
Now. I don't want to spend this essay on the "how". That's easy enough: whether basic income, basic assets (aka trust funds at birth), employment and income guarantees, giving people homes, and so on. Here is the curious thing. Poverty is a solvable problem — we are well on the way to eliminating extreme poverty globally. Why then don't rich countries do so? That is the more interesting question — because if the means are known, then what must be standing in the way is ideology, which is to say economics.
Economics — American economics, anyways, which is the only one you're probably familiar with — doesn't consider poverty a problem at all. It's a feature, not a bug: a kind of just moral just dessert. Poor? Sorry. You deserve it — not just because you are lazy, or less talented, and so on. Because otherwise, how would the talented end up being rewarded more? And if they are not rewarded more, then why would they bother sharing their talents with the less talented rest of us? In this way, American economics is a tale of the trickling down of human possibility — if you let those guys get rich, you'll be better off, even if you stay poor, because they'll give you awesome, wonderful, life-changing things.
Only this theory doesn't hold water in the real world, if we stop to examine it for even a second. Jonas Salk gave the polio vaccine away — just like Tim Berners-Lee did the world wide web, Einstein the theory of relativity, Darwin evolution for the price of a book, and so on. I can keep going — history's point is this: genius has never, and never will, cared much about capitalism — mostly, it is repelled by it, as are most sensible people by now.
So if genius isn't motivated by riches, then who is? Who does care about being rewarded by mega-fortune? Well, it appears to be not even the mediocre, but the worst among us: the least moral, the most cunning, and the most predatory. The Hollywood execs and the billionaires and the Wall Street CEOs and hedge fund tycoons of the world.
In economists' terms, fantastic wealth appears to do the precise opposite of what American economics says it does: it creates adverse selection for goods of transformative, life-giving value, and selects for predatory behaviour instead. How do we know? Well, because figures like the above certainly have not created the vaunted innovations that were to benefit everyone, which was the point of such riches, have they? They have only found ways to game and cheat systems. If they had really created magical and wonderful things that made everyone else's life better off — even the poor's — then American life wouldn't be getting worse in every possible way, from life expectancy to suicide rates to school shootings to stress to infant mortality: both simply cannot be the case.
So the benefits of making people lutra-rich are vastly overblown — to the point of being fairy tales of capitalism. America's example tells us that tuning a society to make a tiny, "talented" few unimaginably wealthy doesn't yield huge benefits for society, because it self-evidently hasn't yielded real breakthroughs that benefit people whatsoever — mostly, it appears to, by rewarding amorality, select for the worst among us, and turn them into predators, who'll stoop to anything to get their hands on such fortunes. Why might that be? Perhaps because, as we grow richer and richer, research shows that we lose our humanity — our capacities for empathy, connection, and meaning all fall apart.
So — why should anyone be poor, if the logic of "we need you to be poor, to make those other more talented people mega-rich, because that's the only way we can all be better off" is so vividly, obviously false?
Perhaps I'm being unfair. Let's examine the other side. What about the costs of making people poor? How high are those? Are they nuisances for a society — or something more like impediments to it?
Well, the uncomfortable fact is that we have known for a long time that the social costs of poverty are the highest ones a society can pay — because they set off a vicious spiral. The central lesson of World War II was that economic stagnation produces fascist movements, by inflaming old racial and tribal divisions, that seats authoritarians in power — and usually ends in war. Poverty, unchecked, implodes democracy — it has the highest cost of all. That is why the post-war economy was rebuilt from the ground up with new constitutions and a new financial system, whose sole goal was to prevent poverty from ever rising in rich nations again — to "never again" allow a World War to happen.
There was only one problem. One country alone (guess who?) America, chose to ignore that lesson — hoping, perhaps, that it was exceptional. Today, sadly, we know that it isn't. Stagnation did to America in the 2000s precisely what it did to Germany in the 1930s. America is repeating the same vicious cycle of democracy imploding into fascism, authoritarianism, hate, and violence — in striking, eerie ways. It's not a coincidence — it's causal: America never accepted that poverty has real social costs, and here it is, paying precisely those costs of destabilization, distrust, polarization, and fragility.
So. Here is my answer. Why should rich countries have poor people, anyways? They shouldn't. The costs are just what history says they are: so high that democracy topples into authoritarianism implosions. And the benefits of poverty are nonexistent — poor people are not a sufficient nor a necessary condition for a tiny elite of geniuses to advance the frontiers of progress for all: that is a fantasy, not an empirical reality. The idea that rich countries — or any countries — need poor people is one of the greatest, most obsolete myths of this century.
I dare to think these day, that in the end, the answer to this great question — "what is the best way that we know to build a working society, anyways?" might be, like most such answers, outrageously more elegant and simple than it appears, just like e=mc² was. Take poverty away — and societies appear to flourish. Democratically, culturally, economically, socially, existentially. The less poor people there are, the more societies become more peaceful, sane, stable, prosperous, wise, gentle, and courageous places.
One day, we will think it was quite crazy — and both sad and funny — that countries ever called themselves "rich", when people in them still lived in poverty. We will come to a better, truer definition of a rich country — one in which no life is lived in penury and indignity, and only then, we will say, can a country dare call itself rich. And we will look back, too, on the idea that anyone in a rich country could die from a lack of money, savings, food, shelter, or healthcare, exactly the same way that today, we look back on servitude, workhouses, and debtors' prisons. With repugnance for human ignorance, pity for human folly — and gratitude that we do not live in such a backwards age.
Umair
August 2023
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People who say that men aren't emotional have clearly never lived with a man whose bad mood seeped into every corner of the house, leaving everyone in the family on edge.
My dad is a good guy, but his bad moods conveyed with heavy, threatening silences, monosyllabic responses, and bursts of annoyance, had the power to make everyone else feel bad and slightly scared.
Despite this, my family often joked about how dad was the non-emotional, stoic man, forced to live with a coven of hysterical women — my mum, my two sisters, and me. Despite having empirical evidence to the contrary, we continued to maintain the myth that men do not feel or express their emotions.
The reality is that men's emotions are huge. They take up so much space in our homes and offices. In comments sections and public debates. Men's emotions create World Wars, black eyes, and tragically bad love songs.
I'm done pretending that men aren't emotional. So, how has this stereotype lasted for so long? and why is it so harmful?
The reason that men are considered less emotional is that they have successfully changed the narrative so that while crying is seen as a sign of feminine hysteria, anger is a sign of masculinity and strength.
As Claire Willet tweeted back in 2020:
"Honestly the best marketing scheme in history is men successfully getting away with calling women the "more emotional" gender for like, EONS, because they've successfully rebranded anger as Not An Emotion."
This is one of those "oh wow" tweets, that makes you think, think twice, and keep on thinking as it dawns on you just how accurate it is.
Men 'aren't emotional', but they are the ones getting in fist fights in bars when someone looks at them funny.
Men 'aren't emotional', but they send death threats to women on the internet when they can't get a girlfriend.
Men 'aren't emotional', but they riot when their sports team loses a game.
Men 'aren't emotional', but when they murder their ex-wives and kids, the media describes it as a "crime of passion".
Anger has effectively become a proxy for all the other negative emotions men experience. They were taught not to cry but that it is okay to punch. The result is a less safe world.
So clearly men don't lack emotions. What they often don't have is the self-awareness to know what they are feeling and why.
Negativity takes the form of a grey cloud of rage and grumpiness because many men are unable to look inside themselves and understand what is going on.
The emotional intelligence of girls is developed from a young age. Caregivers ask us if we are sad, scared, or happy, and we gain the ability to recognise what is going on in our minds. We are told not to hurt people's feelings, so we learn to empathise and think of how others might be experiencing an interaction. This is less common for boys, who are encouraged not to display fear or sadness and often are not expected to be considerate of others. They are told that men don't feel, and so they dismiss their feelings and never get acquainted with their own moods.
This leaves men with many emotions — they are humans, after all, with complex minds and life experiences — but little emotional intelligence with which to handle them.
Men might struggle to name and recognise their emotions, but that doesn't mean they don't want to talk about them. In my experience, guys talk to their female friends extensively about their problems, their relationships, their families, and so on.
Men rely on their female friends to take care of their emotions. They unconsciously divide the world into three categories: men, whom they respect too much and are ashamed to show their emotions too. Women who they want to f*ck, whom they are trying to impress, and in front of whom they mask their real feelings. And the other women, whose function in society must be to nurture and mother them and to listen ad nauseam to their rants.
It is particularly exhausting to hear that "men don't talk about emotions" after you have listened to hours of this, given advice, and got no emotional support in return. In guy-girl friendships, emotional support often goes one way.
Another reason that men think they don't have emotions is that their worldview has long been defined as the default. We have read so many books and watched so many films written by men. Our politics, businesses and news media are dominated by them. We see the men's perspective all the time.
Men are very used to their feelings being taken into account — so used to it, in fact, that there is a troubling tendency for them to make everything about themselves.
When women all around the world spoke up about being harassed, groped, and assaulted, some men's reaction was to get offended and post the hashtag #NotAllMen. This was hard proof that they considered their own emotions to be more real and valid than those of women.
The idea that men don't have feelings is a very common stereotype and one that is harmful to men, women, and society as a whole. It pushes men to channel their emotions into anger and violence instead of ugly crying and therapy. It is used to dismiss women's opinions, maintaining the fallacy of men's minds being more rational and ours being more emotional. It masks realities, like the emotional labour performed by women, the prime caretakers of men's emotions.
What men really lack is emotional intelligence, and the only way that can change is a societal shift toward educating our boys, and teaching them self-awareness and empathy.
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