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In 1963, in a book called The Great Ascent, economist Robert Heilbroner offered to let us imagine "how a typical American family, living in a small suburban house...could be transformed into an equally typical family of the underdeveloped world." What follows is an abstract of that imagining.
In the first place, there is no car.
Begin by removing all the furniture; strip the house of everything--all the beds, chairs, tables, television, lamps. Leave us a few old bankets, a kitchen table, a wooden chair, maybe a stool.
Along with the chests of drawers go the clothes. Each member of the family may keep as wardrobe their oldest suit or dress or outfit, and a shirt or blouse. The head of the family gets a pair of shoes, but no one else.
In the kitchen, remove all the appliances. Our stove will be a tin can like a small barbecue grill and every day we will struggle to find fuel for cooking. Also empty the cupboards and the pantry. A box of matches stays, a small bag of flour, some sugar, some salt. A few moldy potatoes already thrown out must be rescued for tonight's dinner. We're left a handful of onions and a dish of dried beans. Perhaps a small bag of rice. Everything else -- meat, fresh vegetables, frozen foods, packaged foods, canned goods, crackers, cookies, candy -- everything else goes.
Literally dismantle the bathroom and remove all the fixtures: commode, bathtub, shower stall, sink. Now turn off the running water to the house. Shut off the electric power and/or natural gas and/or fuel oil, remove all the connections, and then pull all the electric wires out of the walls. Now remove the interior wallboard and insulation. Then, burn down all of the house except for one smallish bedroom which remains standing in the corner. We move into it. It may be crowded, but it is better than some -- some people elsewhere have no shelter at all.
Our nice little home now looks like hell, but don't feel badly; so does the rest of our neighborhood. All the other houses have been removed; our suburb is now a shantytown with some folks living in their little metal toolsheds in the backyards. Sewers have broken down and sewage now flows along the curbs of what remains of the streets.
Communications now are also gone. No cell phones. No telephones of any kind -- there may be a working public pay phone a couple of miles away. We can no longer afford to buy newspapers or magazines or books, but it doesn't really matter because we're illiterate: we no longer have the ability to read. There is a portable radio we salvaged from the dump that used to work, but the batteries are dead now and we can't afford the coin to buy new ones. Down the block there is a radio that works.
Government services also disappear. No mailperson, no firefighter, and the local police are not necessarily friendly, helpful or available. There is a school several miles away, but it has only two classrooms and only one teacher. But the school is not overcrowded. Most of the children in the neighborhood don't go to school. They are needed elsewhere.
In addition, there are no hospitals or doctors nearby. The nearest clinic is ten miles away and run by a midwife with little medicine. The clinic can be reached by bicycle, provided we still have one and we haven't already sold it to buy food. Or, one could go by public bus, inside it if we're lucky, or hanging on the outside or riding on top.
All our financial resources are also gone. We have no checking account, no savings account, no bankbook, no CD savings, no stocks or bonds, no pension plans, no insurance, no social security. All the money we have in the world is a cash hoard of five dollars.
Got to earn a living now, so we begin cultivating our three acre allotment of land. If we're fortunate as to weather and crops, we may earn $100 to $300 a year. If we are a tenant farmer, one-third of that will go to the landlord, and probably another 10% to the local moneylender to pay for the seed. But there will almost be enough to eat. Of the 2000 daily calories we need, we will get about 1800, creating a deficit that will run our bodies down over time and shorten our life expectancy to less than fifty years.
If we're lucky, the children can help, so we have lots of children. If they can find ways to get some cash, they can supplement the family's income and raise our standard of living. The work is simple, like sealing the ends of bangles over a kerosene lamp and the pay is small: maybe ten cents per gross of bangles. And if they can't find work? They can always scavenge refuse piles, dumps, garbage. Or they can beg, but it helps if they are missing arm or leg or are blind or deformed.
All that's missing here are some of the finer details: the holes and tears in our clothing because the cloth is threadbare and rotting with age. The struggle to have clean clothing and to stay clean personally. The urinous reek of poverty in our neighborhood. The rage and frustration and the drugs and the alcohol. The open sewers and their stench. Disease and its effects. Flies and mosquitoes. Snakes and scorpions and cockroaches and mice and rats. The need to carry every drop of water we use and the uncertainty that its drinkable anyway. The lack of privacy. The familiarity with death, which hovers over the neighborhood and comes early to everyone.
But none of this imagining is real. None of this is true for us. We can consider how fortunate we are. We can also consider how unfortunate they are. Or, recognizing our own good fortune, we can see there is something dreadfully, horrifically wrong with this picture in this world of such great wealth and rich resources.
And we can choose to change it.
Source: Robert L. Heilbroner, The Great Ascent, Harper & Row, 1963.
© 1997, C. Grigsby, All Rights Reserved. 2 Aug 1998
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