An Industrious Nation Can be Trapped by Poverty

Poor are born rather than made

If you ever visit Bangladesh, you’ll find almost everybody in this country is highly industrious. People are working diligently here, day in day out, 24/7. But surprisingly, one out of every five Bangladeshi live in extreme poverty, whereas another two earn minimum wage (around 63 USD per month) in exchange for a usual 10-12 hours workday, 6 days a week!!

You can hardly guess the life of a poor…

If you are reading this article, I can safely assume you belong to the privileged class of society. You don’t need to think about your next day’s food or shelter. Even most probably, you are entitled to numerous social and financial benefits like water, electricity, education, pension fund, stock investment, social security, a secured job, or financial source of income – and the list goes on. Another wild guess from my part, I believe, you have hardly ever considered those benefits as something countable; we are used to taking those things for granted.

Beyond those dreamy cars, there might be a poor soul lying on the footpath

If we wear the poor’s shoes for one day, we will discover some utterly disturbing and ruthless facts that don’t make sense most of the time. A person who lives under 1 dollar a day can barely afford his daily foods. For him/ her, the other 4 basic needs are complete luxuries. He has to drink unhygienic water, he can barely afford two square meals, he will never receive education, and probably, he will never get any healthcare in his lifetime.

The only fault that he has made in his life is being born as poor!

Bill Gates’ notion of ‘if you die poor, that is your fault,’ seems like a utopian statement for me. A person under no roof will never think about becoming a computer programmer. And apparently, a poor country doesn’t have many facilities available for the poor to earn more money.

Coming back to my article’s title, a poor country remains poor for a long time (to be precise, for a lifetime if proper leadership is absent) just because its citizens are poor. They are never entitled to earn money beyond the poverty line.

Let me tell you why.

Imagine you have a small grocery business in a village, where you make a hefty 50% profit on your daily sales. Don’t let the number fool you any soon! As I have mentioned the word ‘small business,’ your daily working capital will not exceed 1000-1500 BDT (or 15-20 USD) per day. Even if you are making a 50% profit, chances are, you are closing your day with a 500-700 BDT (10-15 USD) worth of profit, which is the bare minimum to run your family and buy necessary goods for the next day. If you are a real estate businessman, your 5-7% profit cut will be large enough to ensure $20,000 or more per deal (a mental calculation though).

They don’t even know how to manage the next meal, let alone education or shelter

That’s why Avijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo have depicted the poor as ‘hedge fund managers,’ who are always in a process of constant risk mitigation. To them, life is all about stitching a torn blanket, which keeps breaking apart every single second. If you don’t have money, you are a juggler who is always balancing his wants and demands, who has sequential trade-offs and calculations of opportunity costs.

The point is, the more money you have, the more money you can make.

Let me now divert my discussion from Micro-level to Macro-level proposition. As a country is nothing but the collection of its citizens, no doubt the country will keep being poor when its citizens have to worry about so many things in their daily lives. In a developed country, you never know what load-shedding means. You have not faced a long queue while getting your passport or paying your municipality tax. Your health insurance is auto deducted from your salary. Your employer pays for your pension fund so that you don’t need to worry about your retirement plan. All you need to do is ‘focus on your work,’ have a nice family life, and enjoy your free time.

An ill-paying business won’t allow you to get outta the poverty trap

You don’t have the tension of clean water; your city corporation has got your back.

As a result, the effort of the poor is wasted on unnecessary and disgusting struggles most of the time. Their productivity doesn’t mean much when the result is low-paying in the first place. A 12 hours workday in a garment factory won’t pay a young lady more than 2-3 dollars a day, but her daughter could have earned tens or a thousand times more with proper education. The irony is, her daughter is more likely to be ended up as a garment worker like her mother since her mother hardly affords to pay her tuition fees; or she has to be engaged in child labor to support her family.

Like her mother, she is not entitled to receive an education

Our country doesn’t encourage a complete industrial ecology, where the next generation of workers will be developed manpower within the industrial facility. Why does a cobbler’s son have to be a cobbler like his father? Why industrialists have never focused on developing the lives of their workers in terms of education? Perhaps, clinging people from generation to generation to an ill-payed job benefits a particular group of capitalists, but a country can never get out of the poverty trap with such a desultory policy.

A very common scene in the Indian Subcontinent

You will find many active beggars in the poor countries, who are completely capable of working, but begging seems to be a better-paid job to them since the traditional jobs open for the poor are not often a good source of survival

Talking about policy goes to another dimension of discussion. I will leave my pen here today with two questions for you,

‘All the successes and good things you have achieved in your life, so far, how many of those do you think stemmed from your mere birth identity?

If you were born to a street hawker, do you think you would have become the same person with all the cognitive abilities that you possess today?’

If the answers surprise you, perhaps, it's time to pay back your society.