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Ajaiyi and His Inherited Poverty

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Amos Tutuola

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“The poor are almost fashionable. And this idea of intermediate technology has become an aspect of that fashion. The cult in India centres on the bullock cart. The bullock cart is not to be eliminate; after three thousand or more backward years Indian intermediate technology will now improve the bullock cart. 'Do you know,' someone said to me in Delhi, 'that the investment in bullock carts is equivalent to the total investment in the railways?' I had always had my doubts about bullock carts; but I didn't know until then that they were not cheap, were really quite expensive, more expensive than many second-hand cars in England, and that only richer peasants could afford them. It seemed to me a great waste, the kind of waste that poverty perpetuates. But I was glad I didn't speak, because the man who was giving me these statistics went on: 'Now, if we could improve the performance of the bullock cart by ten per cent ...' What did it mean, improving the performance by ten per cent? Greater speed, bigger loads? Were there bigger loads to carry? These were not the questions to ask, though. Intermediate technology had decided that the bullock cart was to be improved. Metal axles, bearings, rubber tyres? But wouldn't that make the carts even more expensive? Wouldn't it take generations, and a lot of money, to introduce these improvements? And, having got so far, mighn't it be better to go just a little further and introduce some harmless little engine? Shouldn't intermediate technology be concentrating on harmless little engines capable of short journeys bullock carts usually make?”

PovertyTechnologyDevelopmentIndiaInnovation
Book:India: A Wounded Civilization
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“Writing a decade later, in the essay 'Experience and Poverty' of 1933, Benjamin, unsurprisingly, saw the phenomenon differently: 'A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body. With this tremendous development of technology, a completely new poverty has descended on humankind. And the reverse side of this poverty is the oppressive wealth of ideas that has been spread among people, or rather has swamped them entirely - ideas that have come with the revival of astrology and the wisdom of yoga, Christian Science and chiromancy, vegetarianism and gnosis, scholasticism and spiritualism. For this is not a genuine revival but a galvanization.' If Kracauer maintains the idealist notion that 'concrete communal forms' might arise as the reflection of ideas emanating from a generalized national spirit, Benjamin suggests that the unceasing profusion of this 'wealth of ideas' would actually 'swamp' people - and that a new experiential poverty or constructive divestiture is actually the only appropriate response to the times.”

IdeasWealthPovertyTechnologyModernityDivestiture
Book:Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
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“Oh, I have what a lot of people would probably call communistic thoughts,” said Eliot artlessly, “but, for heaven’s sakes, Father, nobody can work with the poor and not fall over Karl Marx from time to time—or just fall over the Bible, as far as that goes. I think it’s terrible the way people don’t share things in this country. I think it’s a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies. Life is hard enough, without people having to worry themselves sick about money, too. There’s plenty for everybody in this country, if we’ll only share more.”

PovertyInequalityCommunismVonnegut
Book:God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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“The murder of a child by a parent is horrific and is usually complicated by serious mental illness, as in the Yates and Smith cases. But these cases also tend to create distortions and bias. Police and prosecutors have been influenced by the media coverage, and a presumption of guilt has now fallen on thousands of women—particularly poor women in difficult circumstances—whose children die unexpectedly. Despite America's preeminent status among developed nations, we have always struggled with high rates of infant mortality—much higher than in most developed countries. The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and post-partum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades. Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world. The criminalization of infant mortality and the persecution of poor women whose children die have taken on new dimensions in twenty-first-century America, as prisons across the country began to bear witness.”

DeathPovertyMortalityHealthcareDeath Of A ChildInfant MortalityInfantsCriminalizationChild MortalityDeath Of An Infant
Book:Just Mercy
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