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Friday, August 16, 2002
The cliches get cliched...Virginia Postrel notes that, contrary to semi-popular belief, the poor aren't getting poorer."When I started looking at the numbers, I saw a lot of mistakes," says Xavier Sala-i-Martin, an economist at Columbia. Some were departures from standard economic procedures, like not correcting for price levels from country to country.The news isn't uniformly good; Africa is in bad shape. Many of the countries in Africa are not only basket cases, but actually getting worse. But it's rather difficult to blame globalization for the problems of Africa, given that Africa has been largely left out of the world's economy. But for the most part, we should be celebrating economic news. The rich did get richer faster than the poor did. But for the most part the poor did not get poorer. They got richer, too. In exchange for significantly rising living standards, a little more internal inequality is not such a bad thing.Amen. The real problem with cliches is that they allow people to avoid thinking. Thus we encounter people who talk about "the gap between rich and poor" without stopping to think about what their complaint actually is. Whenever I hear the phrase, my first thought is "So, you'd be happy if a bunch of the rich people went bankrupt?" Generally -- readers of the Nation excepted -- this isn't true, of course. But they've picked a statistic which doesn't measure what they really care about, which is the standard of living of the poor. And so we hear silly comments about inequality, instead of talking about how the poor are doing.
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